Lara Sinclair | August 14, 2008
UNPRECEDENTED demand for Telstra's BigPond Beijing Olympic mobile television packages has created some network congestion, after the group sold 50 per cent more subscriptions than expected.
The Olympics -- for which Telstra is the official mobile carrier -- would be a watershed moment in the development of the mobile as a content medium, BigPond group general manager Justin Milne predicted yesterday.Paid Olympics packages on Telstra include live streams of Seven and SBS TV content and cost $9.95 for the Games, or $3.95 for a single day, while a one-off video is 50c to view.
"We don't give out numbers but we're 50 per cent over the targets that we set for ourselves," Mr Milne said.
"We've had huge take-up," he said. "It has the potential to be a bit of a watershed because the Olympics is so mainstream.
"We expect that more and more people, having used the Olympics, will sign up to other packages."
A spokesman yesterday said some subscribers experienced delays accessing the live Olympics content due to demand for the service.
Telstra yesterday revealed in its annual results that 3G penetration had more than doubled to 47 per cent of its base (or 4.4 million subscribers) in the year to June.
Mr Milne said BigPond's content revenue had grown 70 per cent year-on-year and would grow by a similar amount this financial year.
"The percentage of BigPond's revenue that is content, compared with access services, is still relatively small. It will be in the 15 per cent range," he said.
BigPond is the only remaining mobile carrier with a significant investment in exclusive content -- mainly sport, including the AFL, NRL, V8 Supercars and ThoroughVision live horseracing (which is already believed to have 1000 subscribers).
Hutchison's 3 carrier will continue to offer exclusive cricket subscriptions this summer, along with a Project Runway channel, and Vodafone offers exclusive Rugby TV and Street TV channels and some licensed international content. Instead of using hit shows to grow subscribers, most carriers have turned their attention to providing access to the mobile via capped data plans. This enables consumers to instead seek the content they want.
Optus has largely turned its back on exclusive content, focusing instead on providing mobile social networking and mobile search services.
Its non-SMS mobile data revenue jumped from 4.4 per cent to 7 per cent in the June quarter.
"As devices become more sophisticated with the launch of the iPhone and similar devices and bandwidth grows, people are going online on their phone a lot more often," Optus portals and content general manager Mark Mulder said. "The two major trends driving growth have been in social networking and in mobile search," he said.
"Social networking is driving the bulk of our mobile traffic at the moment and it's up 50pc over the quarter," he said. "YouTube is now making up the bulk of our video streams."
A similar trend is evident at 3, according to communications and internet services head Jana Kotatko, who said search engine Google was the top mobile site on 3, followed by social networking site Facebook and email provider Hotmail.
"We're not really all for exclusive content," Mr Kotatko said. "We're for providing a great broad base of services."
Even BigPond is walking away from exclusive content in some areas -- drama, for example.
"I don't think there is a lot of content that people want to pay for," Mr Milne said.
"We've had tremendous subscriber growth this year for all of our sports packs.
"There's other content that's nice to have but it's not essential so people won't pay for it."
"Comedy works really well," he said. "People will pay for it. We have a whole bunch of Seinfeld episodes for sale. Interestingly, drama doesn't seem to have worked quite so well. We've tried a variety of things (including Nine Network drama) Damages. It's hard to get deeply deeply involved for a long time with a mobile phone screen."
Mr Milne said live sports would remain attractive, along with live results and statistics packaged with sport.
BigPond has sold advertising packages to two advertisers on its own Olympics content, which includes results, news headlines, medal tallies and video highlights on demand, in addition to the live TV streaming and SMS alerts.
Dodge and the Australian Defence Forces have paid an undisclosed amount to advertise on Telstra's mobile Olympics packages.
Music downloads are also expected to remain a key growth driver on phones. Yesterday BigPond launched an online music store that allows people to download tracks in MP3 format from the four major record labels and to play them on most digital platforms and music players.