iSuppli: Cell Phone Premium Content Market to Reach $40 billion by 2010

Courtesy of Tekrati comes news of a report from iSuppli that predicts the "global market for cell phone premium content, including music, gaming and video, is expected to expand to more than $43 billion by 2010, rising at a compound annual growth rate of 42.5 percent from $5.2 billion in 2004.

Mark Kirstein at iSuppli said, "After years of hyper growth, mobile-phone markets in several major regions around the world are maturing, resulting in slower subscriber growth and declining Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for wireless communications carriers. Meanwhile, new 3G networks offer increased bandwidth, but require compelling applications and content to drive revenue and provide a return on investment to operators. Against this backdrop, mobile-service carriers and content providers are establishing new business models to capture the growing opportunity."

According to iSuppli, "mobile music, led by ringtones and ringtunes, represents the largest and fastest-moving premium-content segment in the wireless world. The market in 2005 grew rapidly over the $3.8 billion revenue mark achieved in 2004, as the industry made a major transition from traditional polyphonic ringtones to ringtunes."

Kirstein believed "mobile video offers perhaps the most significant long-term opportunity in the mobile-content market," since "the market for mobile video is still at the nascent stage, even in Asia." iSuppli noted that "mobile TV will depend entirely on new phone deployments. Even with reasonably strong adoption of mobile-TV technology and subscribers, the installed base of TV-capable phones will only represent 12 percent of the total by 2010."