Movies on mobile phones for China
Los Angeles-based Telecom Communications (TCOM) plans to help feed the mainland's growing appetite for wireless data services by offering film industry content to millions of mobile phone subscribers.
The firm, which operates two subsidiaries in China, has signed a deal to resell licensed content from the French firm Film Festivals Entertainment Group (FFEG) to its 10 million subscribers and 300 service provider partners in the mainland.
'Interest in movies knows no boundaries, and language is decreasingly important,' said FFEG chief operating officer Bruno Chatelin. 'Just this week the Golden Globe Awards broadcast had an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. We are confident TCOM is well qualified to market our extraordinary content in China.'
The mainland is the world's largest mobile phone market, with more than 255 million users. Its size also means that there is plenty of room for growth for digital content providers.
'We are in a rapid growth mode at our SMS [short-message service] and MMS [multimedia-messaging service] business, and extending content offering is one of our major goals this year to achieve substantial growth,' said Zhengbin Liu, vice-president of business development at TCOM.
Market analyst iResearch said the mainland wireless messaging business (carried via text-based SMS and video-ready MMS facilities) was expected to generate total revenues of US$3.3 billion in 2006 from $320 million in 2002.
Offering digital content to mobile phone users has become a lucrative business for mainland internet portal operators such as Sina, Sohu.com and Netease.
Last year, for example, Sohu.com strengthened its online media and mobile data business with a deal to design, produce and host the Walt Disney Internet Group's portal for China. The United States entertainment giant also licensed its SMS and MMS content for distribution via its Disney China site and the Sohu.com portal.
Mr Liu said demand continued to grow. Chinese mobile phone users sent more than 100 billion text messages last year, an estimated 10,000 per cent growth since 2000.
'These subscribers sent over 10 billion messages on New Year's Day alone,' he said.
TCOM hopes that mainland users will find much to like and use from the content provided by FFEG, which hosts the leading Web portal for international film festivals and film news.
FFEG chief executive Malo Girod de l'Ain said the Paris-based company had established partnerships with many media sources to construct a strong film festival circuit - including Cannes, Paris, Venice and Los Angeles - that generated a steady stream of entertainment content every year.
