Frost & Sullivan releases Europe mobile content predictions

Another day, another analyst report of how much money mobile content is going to make. This time it's Frost & Sullivan crunching the figures.

Its new European Mobile Premium Content Markets report claims that revenue from this content (including games but also music, TV/video and personalisation) was worth €2.68 billion last year, and that this'll grow to €11 billion by 2012.

My favourite quote from the press release: "Content is the new horizon for the European mobile industry," according to analyst Saverio Romeo.

And there's more: "During the last three years, mobile operators have been observing a slow, but continuous decline in the average revenue per user (ARPU) due to the decrease of voice and SMS ARPU. New sources of revenue are needed: content is an excellent candidate."

The problem is that operators have known this whole voice/text ARPU decline thing for the past three years, but haven't shown decisive evidence that they can make enough from mobile content to make up for that decline.

"Consumers will use content on mobile devices if the industry is able to offer high-quality content with an excellent user experience at affordable prices," says Romeo.

So, hang on, does that mean pushing variable quality branded games in unintutive retail portals for a fiver apiece isn't going to work? Oops!

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