More than three years after the wireless industry launched an effort to establish a ratings system for mobile content, carriers are finally beginning to restrict access to the edgy stuff. Whether such efforts will help fuel data revenues, though, remains to be seen.
CTIA in early 2004 began working with tier-one carriers to create guidelines for mature content on operator decks in an effort to stave off potential federal intervention. The industry eventually agreed on a system that divided videos and other content into two categories-essentially labeling it as G or NC-17-and vowed not to offer restricted carrier-controlled content until carriers independently developed ways to effectively block restricted offerings.
Meanwhile, U.S. network operators adopted a more conservative-but equally simple-approach: content deemed acceptable to general audiences was considered for deck space, while anything racier was barred from the deck. “To date, the carriers have not deployed much in the way of contentaccess restrictions,” said Mark Desautels, vice president of wireless Internet development for CTIA. “As a result, by and large, they’re not offering content” that would otherwise be categorized as restricted.
That’s changing, of course, as the barriers crumble between television, the Internet and mobile. While U.S. operators continue to refuse to do business with pornography vendors-denying purveyors of hardcore material not just deck space but the all-important carrier billing mechanism-less controversial content is already available for consumers away from carrier decks. Ringtones and other goodies from “South Park” are available on the Web site for Comedy Central, for instance, and users can go off-deck to customize their handsets with “Moantones,” audio clips of porn stars set to music.
PG-13 experiments
Similar PG-13-type offerings are slowly but surely making their way onto carrier decks as well. AT&T Mobility, for instance, is distributing full-length episodes of adultoriented HBO programs “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “Entourage.” Subscribers have the choice of blocking access to such content from anyone on the account.
Unlike their brethren on the Internet, carriers and other stakeholders in the adult mobile content market aren’t charged with blazing their own trails. Online porn vendors, Internet service providers and others have adopted voluntary policies that require users to state their ages in order to access hardcore offerings. Such practices were years in the making, and are far from foolproof. But while U.S. policy-makers have tried to intervene ever since the early days of mass-market Internet usage, those voluntary guidelines have managed to assuage the fears of some legislators.
“I think that with the technologies that are coming along now, (wireless companies) can look at the experience that happened on the Internet, can learn from that and also borrow from that,” said Robert Corn-Revere, a lawyer who specializes in the First Amendment and telecommunications in the Washington office of law firm Davis Wright Tremaine L.L.P. “We forget just how young the worldwide Web is; there was just this explosion as we’ve never seen before. It’s no surprise that it took a while for efforts (to establish policies addressing content) to catch up.”
V-chips for the phone
It’s those new technologies that may finally help carriers tap potentially vast revenues from edgier content-revenues that are currently being left on the table. Embedded software could help users customize handsets for family members, similar to the V-chip technology that has become mandatory on most television sets in the United States. Biometric technology on phones could identify users based on fingerprints or voice-identification software, for instance, automatically granting access to authorized users but barring others from accessing certain types of content.
But while technological solutions are likely to help boost the market for premium cable-type offerings, they aren’t the biggest hurdle for those looking to cash in on mobile porn. Instead, the fear of a public-relations nightmare has effectively prevented any major U.S. operator from wading into the controversial waters of sex-related content.
Steamy offerings have generated big bucks in Europe and some emerging markets, but North American operators continue to keep the stuff at arm’s length. Even simple nudity can draw the wrath of some consumers: Canadian operator Telus was forced to withdraw its racy offerings earlier this year after receiving hundreds of customer complaints about the service, which had come online less than two weeks earlier. A Catholic archdiocese in Vancouver, British Columbia, led the charge against the operator.
Mobile subscribers are increasingly becoming more tech-savvy, though, and are beginning to leave the comfortable confines of operator decks and step further into the wireless Web, where carrier policies don’t apply. And transcoding services can automatically format much of the wider Internet, allowing users to access a host of content across the broader Internet.
It’s nearly inconceivable that any U.S. operator-or even any mobile virtual network operator-will put pornographic offerings on the deck anytime soon, of course, and consumers looking for hardcore offerings on their phone will continue to have to reach for a credit card instead of paying for porn on their monthly statement. When it comes to less controversial adult-targeted material, however, network operators soon may have the infrastructure in place to generate lucrative data revenues without jeopardizing their relationships with more conservative subscribers. And it’s been a long time coming.
“(Carriers) have had to make a significant investment in their technology” to install systems that can identify users and enforce content-restriction policies, Desautels said. “The question is, What’s the RIO? It’s a very sophisticated question. It is not a simple thing to work though; it gets to be very complex.”
