Raghavendra Agarwala

BANGALORE, INDIA: At present over 100 million people in India own mobile phones. The market presents significant opportunities for all the stakeholders in mobile VAS chain. In India, wireless operators, music and film companies, cartoon artists, game makers and P2P (Peer-to Peer) services are all aggressively entering the mobile content market for ring tones, gaming, mobile imagery and streaming audio and video.

Currently the industry, which is pegged around revenue of $1.2 billion, will see major growth in the music, mobile gaming and networking segments suggests Industry reports.

As per the 3G services to be rolled out fully in India, the industry experts feel that the 3G customers would be keener than 2G customers to use a variety of multi-media services. At present music and games are downloaded on GPRS or 2.5 G platform.

The P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing revenue stream is yet to be tapped fully. At present there are very few players in India offering P2P content handling. In the backdrop of such scenario, mBit Infotech Pvt. Ltd. has launched its product ‘mBit’ to facilitate mobile users P2P file sharing and searching.

Future Trends

Sustained Subscriber Growth
Number of mobile users is now growing at a steady pace . The growth will sustain in future as well. Some of the important factors which will drive growth of the mobile subscriber base: introduction of new operators, expansion in rural India, launch of operations by newer operators, issuing of 3G licenses triggering the opening up a new world of data services.

New Operators to face stiff competition
The Indian market can be thought of consisting of two markets: the urban Market which is the competition-filled, saturated battlegrounds and accounts to a huge chunk of subscribers, and the rural market covering the rest of India having a huge potential size of up to a billion subscribers. The urban Market wants Data and Value-Added Services (VAS), while the rural Market needs Access (Voice).

Operators to focus on VAS and Data Services
Mobile users in larger cities have been using Voice and P2P SMS for many years. They further want to explore with their phones. There are many things for them in future. 3G will be a trigger for richer services, and would drive higher ARPUs (Average Revenue Per User).

Good time for VAS Operators
Currently, Voice and Rentals revenue stream generates around 90 per cent of the revenue. P2P SMS generates around 5 per cent. This is where the remaining 5 per cent comes in for VAS share. Now the new VAS players are emerging who will create direct-to-consumer, P2P file sharing services and focus exclusively on VAS. Further, entirely new revenue streams will be generated – including revenues from advertisers and businesses.

Increased use of Mobile Internet, Social Media and Rich Media
In India the cheaper plans will encourage the use of the mobile Internet and other services, and create the necessary pull for companies to start building out mobile data services. Operators will benefit from large-scale adoption of data plans. Services such as P2P content sharing to streaming TV channels, smart handsets, flat-rate data plans and 3G will be the gateway to a wide array of rich media.

P2P Application

Computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between service peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

In computing, a peer-to-peer system delivers services for which the participants share a portion of their own resources, such as processing power, disk storage, network bandwidth, content and so on. Such resources are provided directly to other participants without intermediary network hosts or servers.

Breather
There are very encouraging trends that facilitate the evolution of the Indian VAS market. From co-marketing initiatives with operators to the focus on youth and visibility, we expect to play a leading role in P2P content sharing domain of VAS and be a part of this development.

Challenges
The major challenge is the scalability of services in a country of India's size. The customer focus will clearly be the differentiator and a quality, reliable and consistent delivery is seen as a critical need apart from innovative and exciting offerings.

Suggestions
Consumers should be allowed to try out more services at zero or low cost. Needless to say- the VAS market would expand. Operators would have to work out new solutions and strategies to engage customers.

(The author is CEO of mBit Infotech India) 

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