The trend in TV is clearly away from broadcast TV and towards on-demand (or downloaded) programming. Why should broadcast TV be more interesting on the mobile than on a fixed TV? I think rather the opposite, and I don’t see why so much investment is being put into solutions for broadcasting TV to mobiles. Will the live shows (mainly sports events) really justify this?
Wi-Fi has already taken an important role in mobilizing broadband solutions, in the home and in the office. A large part of home ADSL users already have Wi-Fi routers, and ADSL providers are increasingly providing this as part of their standard offering. Wi-Fi provides a local wireless extension to the fixed broadband offering, but does not extend effectively out of the office, home and some restrictive hot spots. So far, Wi-Fi has been used to extend the fixed internet experience and has not so much been used in extending or replacing the mobile services.
Analysts have predicted that Wi-Fi will play an increasingly important role in mobile services. Some predict that Wi-Fi will be a competitor and threat to cellular carriers, while some say that Wi-Fi will only complement the cellular carriers’ offerings. The question is whether this is a disruptive technology that will change the industry as a whole, or just a sustaining technology that will provide cellular carriers with a richer service offering without disrupting the market. The answer lies with how the existing cellular carriers embrace the Wi-Fi technology and how they shape their existing services to respond to the threat of Wi-Fi.
Many analysts and vendors predict communication convergence. One of the great mantras of the dotcom days were unified messaging. You should be able to send a message to your contact and not worry about how the message is delivered.
The traditional notion of unified messaging shows a clear misunderstanding of what is actually wanted by the market. Unified messaging was defined by vendors who did not understand the communication trends amongst young people.