David made an interesting point in a comment recently about the ridiculous prices people are paying for ring tones and how this may be encouraging news for more sophisticated content (like video). If people are willing to pay 50p or more for a few seconds of music in a ringtone, how much might they be willing to pay to see a key goal scored in a football match or an important news story?
Of course Mazingo tried pocket video stories a while back using a system like avantgo. I think it worked by syncing a pocket pc or palm unit with a server somewhere. Then you got video clips pushed to the unit. The costs eventually got the better of them because the company isn’t really doing that anymore. I think the most likely reason for failure was because they had difficulty charging for a service that was extremely expensive to provide.
Video over 3G networks has two crucial advantages over Mazingo. The first is that the people operating the system have a proven solid billing and payments system. Ring tone buyers have been useful guinea pigs for more sophisticated products and Vodafone has been running it’s Vodafone live service for some time now. So the payment side of things is working. The other key advantage is people seem willing to pay for services on mobile phones that they wouldn’t if they were buying the service via the internet and a regular PC (Or even to sync to a Pocket PC or Palm device). Somehow the networks have managed to convince users that their mobile phone is something different (and more expensive) and that they should expect to pay. Whether this view can be sustained is difficult to guess, but I suspect that it will probably last a little while yet.
I don’t know whether this means that 3G services will be sucessful or not. I suspect that eventually people will realise that the wider internet offers more scope and lower prices. The mobile networks may have to accept that their product is really just a commodity.
How long this takes is the key question though. It makes the difference between recovering the billions spent on 3G licenses and not. I suspect the networks will be paying very close attention to this indeed.