Bagel Belly Blog

Carriers and content providers

Joi Ito writes that carriers shouldn't be content providers: "I'm thinking more and more about how I think it might be a bad idea for the carriers to get into the content business [...] The main value that always-on provides is presence information, short messages and time sensitive stuff like news.".

Well, without giving too much of the game away, it seems like at least in the UK this is what's happening. The content providers are tooling up to serve up content themselves, rather than just delivering it to the mobile network providers (often in scarily archaic ways).

At the same time, some of the mobile network providers are doing the re-engineering necessary to become conduits - which makes a lot of sense: content creation is not their core business, and they are always going to put priority on investing in network infrastructure. They need cheap ways of channelling other people's content. They are also shifting focus of the stuff they do provide to "high refresh" content ... exactly the time-sensitive stuff that Joi talks about.

Currently listening to Finished Symphony (Hybrid's Soundtrack Edit) from the album Dreamstates (Disc 1) by Hybrid