Music to dominate mobile content by 2011

According to a new report issued by market intelligence firm iSuppli, premium mobile content providers and aggregators earned $7.7 billion of the total $16.3 billion mobile content market in 2006--mobile operators raked in $4.4 billion from content, while content enablement platform providers claimed the remaining $4.2 billion. iSuppli forecasts the overall mobile content market will grow to $35.3 billion by 2011, $19.3 billion of which will line the pockets of providers and aggregators--the report adds that full-track downloads, ringtones and related music services will account for nearly half of all content revenues.

"Bringing content to a handset is a very complex and fragmented process with an assortment of partners and ever-changing proportions of on-deck and off-portal transactions," said iSuppli, principal analyst for multimedia content, services and infrastructure Frank Dickson in a prepared statement. "In some instances, players in the value chain will be partners and in some instances, they will be competitors. However, we will see a more simplified ecosystem in the future as companies such as Amdocs, Nokia, Real Networks and Sybase have led a wave of acquisitions in the space that measures in the billions of dollars. Furthermore, the acquisition wave seems to be intensifying."

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