Mobile market and IPTV

Analysts are always pretty keen on analyzing things, I've noticed. For the most part many of the reports published can be ignored, or at least put in the read-at-some-point-if-there-is-absolutely-NOTHING-else-to-do heap.

A couple of reports this week seem quite interesting, though. First of all, Informa have released a report regarding the mobile market and the high probability that mobile operators will be missing out on the opportunity to get their share of the enormous amount of revenue to be made in that market over the coming years.

The report states that mobile operators should NOT try to be something that they are not - meaning that they should stick to what they know, offering mobile coverage to their customers and billing them for it. To get into the content part of mobile media, the best thing is to form alliances with companies providing such content - not to start developing and offering such content themselves.

Pretty straightforward advice, right? I'd be following it, were I a mobile operator :)

Another report, from Strategy Analytics, states that IPTV will reach 80 million subscribers by the year 2011. This does not contradict earlier reports, but the interesting thing is that this report suggests that more than half of the IPTV subscribers will actually not pay anything for their IPTV. Instead, most will be bundled up in triple-play subscriptions offered by the telcoms, including broadband, VoIP and IPTV all in one package.

Now there's an interesting situation - where will the money to make IPTV programming come from then?