US : Yankee Group announced the results of its 2006 European Mobile Multimedia Survey, a comprehensive examination of European mobile multimedia trends providing valuable insight into current consumer behavior. Some of the major highlights include:

• User demand for mobile TV is modest. Only 11% of respondents said they are very interested in the service. Once confronted with the reality of how much the TV service is likely to cost (i.e., €15 or US $19 per month), 85% of respondents said they are less interested in the service.

• Full-track music downloads continue to dominate the headlines, while in reality user interest remains low. Only 5% of respondents are prepared to pay more than a 20% premium for full-track downloads. However, the typical premium today is 100%. Alternative music-related services are more interesting to the user and more likely to generate revenue in the short term.

• The industry must do more to convince users that browsing and downloading is safe and affordable. Almost 40% of respondents said fears over price dissuade them from downloading more ringtones.

However, mobile operators are overcoming the technical barriers to delivering many of their services. Picture messaging—which in the pastwas dogged by unreliability and poor ease-of-use—seems to have solved those problems. Respondents’ main barriers to using picture messaging are price and no need to send picture.

"The survey results illustrate that mobile operators have some pretty substantial barriers to overcome to drive growth in value-added services," said Matt Hatton (above), Yankee Group Wireless/Mobile Europe senior analyst. "Operators are pinning their hopes on advanced applications such as music and TV to drive revenue growth, but they still have a lot of technical, pricing and marketing issues to overcome to drive adoption. They’ll get there, but maybe not through the services they think."

This survey enables service providers, device manufacturers, content providers and infrastructure vendors to understand the status of mobile multimedia services in Europe today, and to identify the barriers limiting consumer adoption. It analyzes customer opinions about current and forthcoming services such as mobile music (including ringtones, ringback tones and full-track downloads), video/TV, gaming, video telephony, MMS and mobile browsing.

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