Growing mobile content services and networks
Mobile commerce and advertising are growing
Mobile video is still emerging
From 3G to 4G leadership
Growing mobile content services and networks
User generated content and messaging are the top usage : 25% of subscribers send more than 5 messages/day, and 10% more than 10, according to Impress. DoCoMo’s Decomail, service is popular with teenagers who use sites such as Decotomo.jp, Disney to offer purchase messaging personalization content. Social networking is growing : 10 million users (50% of teenagers, 35% of 20-30 year old) generate 20 billion PV/month on Dena’s Mobagetown, which offers free browser flash games, social networking and 10,000 digital items. 1.7 million users (25% of teenagers, 39% of 20-30 year old) generate 93 million PV/day on KDDI’s mikle.jp mobile community with 11 user generated content categories such as gaming (#3), love (#10) etc.
Internet providers have established strong partnerships with mobile operators : Web searches rank 3rd among the most popular mobile data services , behind e-mail and news. Google Search appears directly on the top screen of KKDDI and DoCoMo users with the banner enhanced by Google. Google also develops mobile applications with NTT DoCoMo, sharing behavioral mobile search data and splitting advertising revenues. Yahoo! Mobile , owned by Softbank is the country’s most popular Web portal with 18 million mobile subscribers and gets 4 billion PV/month. 14 million users (out of 82 million) access the internet exclusively from their mobile phone according to Impress R&D.One additional driver has been the 9:1 on-deck revenue share for content providers. NTT DoComo’s i-Mode menu still drives 5 billion PV/month.
Mobile commerce and advertising have doubled
Mobile commerce is used by 36% of Japanese users and estimated ARPU of 300$ exceeds mobile content revenues according to Impress and Infinita. NTT DoCoMo provides Rakutenchi mobile auctions on the i-menu and Softbank offers Yahoo! Shopping and Auctions. For mobile payment , 30% of handsets support the Sony Felica RFID chip for contact less transactions at train and plane gates and with more than 70 commercial retailers.
Mobile advertising revenues doubled since 2006 to 620 M$ (62.1 ¥B) and 25% of Japanese companies use it . This is still only 10% of on-line advertising spending at 4.4B$ (443 B¥) and 1% of total advertising, according to Dentsu communication institute. Typical banner rates are 5’000-10’000$/week for 2-20 million PV and there is a large choice of options between these. Mobile advertising was the topic of the MoMo Tokyo meeting on April 21st at Google’s offices in Shibuya . An example of mobile online community using Mobile Adsense is mikle.jp. They have 129 million PV/month and 2.3 million users/month.
Mobile video is maturing
Mobile broadcasting branded “1seg” was introduced in Japan in 2006 and now reaches 25 million subscribers in Japan can receive broadcast TV on mobile , with a data link for mobile information or advertising. Check 1 seg on YouTube.
On the user generated video content, one service is My Tube from a mobile service provider called Key Life that provides video sharing aggregation ( from You Tube, Google Video, Ameba vision, Dailymotion), with a specific focus on for Japanese content. And there is a very small usage of video calling for similar video bloging experiences. In general, video calling quality was very good and international calls worked very well.My Japanese colleagues showed demos of video convergence across TV screens, PCs and mobile handsets with the related issues of video adaptation and service control.
From 3G to 4G leadership
Japans counts over 90 million 3G subscribers (+30 million since 2006) according to Impress R&D :
25 million have usage-based contracts
38 million have flat rate contracts
25 million use 3.5G HSxPA
Throughout my visit I was impressed by the high quality of coverage, even in-building. Last month, NTT DoCoMo announced the result of their 3G long term evolution (LTE) tests in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo. They achieved downlink transmission at 250Mbps using a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) with a 4-antenna base station using the full 20MHz bandwidth (specifying 300 Mbps peak ) . They advertise this as “Super G” and talk about a first network roll out in 2010. Mobile gaming and mobile TV applications will be enhanced through the introduction of LTE, benefiting from < 10ms latency and high peak-rates. 70 million 4G subscribers are forecasted by 2013 (Europe 30 million, Asia Pacific 21 millions and North America 17 million) according to Informa.
Evolution of service infrastructure
In a panel in Sapporo we discussed service infrastructure, together with George Mc Gregor, VP of services at HP OpenCall, Dr. Suphachet Phermphoonwatanasuk, from AIS in Thailand , Martin Gutberlet, VP Research at Gartner. Gartner’s view of the top mobile business opportunities includes : mobile TV 40 B$, mobile music 31 B$, mobile broadband 28 B$, mobile advertising 14 B$. AIS discussed their target architecture to combine voice, music and video services using VXML and SIP application servers on 2G and 3G networks. In a following talk in Tokyo, I demonstrated mobile instant communications, video blogging and the use of web technology such as WSDL network APIs, JSR309 Java APIs, and SMIL) to provide interfaces to networks and create interactive video services. Subscriber statistics update
DoCoMo 53.4 million
KDDI 30.2 million, slight decrease due to phase-out of Tu-Ka
Softbank 18.8 million, growing
