Smart enablers to uplift revenues, but challenges remain

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: A joint member survey between Ovum and Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) reveals an optimistic outlook among respondents that believe smart enablers could have a positive impact on their revenues.

“But this doesn’t mean the industry can rest on its laurels: there is still work to be done, notably in defining a collaborative framework that reduces the danger of fragmentation across the smart enablers value chain”, said Eden Zoller, principal analyst.

Based on the survey, the majority (50 percent) of respondents expect smart enablers to produce revenue uplift in the region of 1–25 percent. “The actual revenue uplift will vary depending on the type of player in question and its strategic focus”, said Zoller, based in London.

The survey revealed that operator revenue expectations are comparatively modest, with 7 percent expecting to see revenue uplift in the 1–25 percent bracket. This is logical, as the provision of smart enabler services by operators presents an incremental revenue opportunity to their core business.

The survey reveals opportunities across the value chain. For content players the opportunity is bigger; for example, the ability to use smart enablers to produce an enhanced service that can command a premium. There could also be revenue lift from smarter business models; for example, access to charging APIs that enable in-application billing, which means support for more sophisticated “freemium” business models.

For aggregators, there is the prospect of expanding their whole business proposition to support the smart enabler framework from a cross-network perspective. Technology providers could see revenue benefits from the provision of platfroms and integration services.

Alongside all of the above are opportunities for improved mobile advertising revenues from leveraging smart enablers, particularly those related to customer insights, with (as always) strict adherence to privacy and security best practice.

In terms of their preferred partner: 50 percent of survey respondents want to work with operators, while the rest show a more mixed view of partnership opportunities. While competition is inevitable, all-out war across the value chain will be counterproductive and instead players should look at exploiting collaborative opportunities, of which they are many.

“The reality is that content providers and application developers will work with more than one enabling partner; for example, a web developer might produce a social networking application that draws on application programming interfaces (APIs) from Facebook, Google Maps, and one or more operators’ network location capabilities,” observes Zoller.

“In this context, operator APIs are one of the available tools in a wider web-based toolkit where developers are free to make applications based on a mashup of standardized APIs”.