When the Finnish-owned company Blyk hatched its plan to revolutionise the advertising business by offering consumers free calls and texts in return for accepting ads, it launched in the UK first.
When its compatriot Nokia announced that it was finally biting the bullet and launching fully-fledged games and music stores, it also got started in Britain. No one was surprised for a moment.
We all accept the notion that, in a market where the United States does not dominate, Britain is arguably the most advanced mobile territory in the Western world. Yes, the Spanish and the Italians might argue this – and in Zed, Buongiorno and Dada they have three of the world’s D2C giants – but the UK can probably boast more content developers, publishers, service providers and aggregators per capita than anywhere outside of Japan and Korea.
It’s been this way since the origins of the mobile entertainment business at the end of the 1990s. There was a flurry of activity in the UK at that point, as a nascent industry put down its roots.
1999 saw the formation of Bango and mBlox, each of which would go on to play a crucial part in the development of a content market outside of operator control: Bango by building a self-sustaining ecosystem enabling small vendors to build sites and monetise them, mBlox by pioneering a reverse-billed premium SMS system that would become the dominant payment mechanism for mobile content.
These two – and others like MX Telecom and WIN – created the right market conditions for local D2C brands like iTouch, PartyMob and MonsterMob to flourish. Indeed, by 2005, off-portal constituted 70 per cent of all data traffic (according to Vodafone). Although the subscription-led D2C market eventually came unstuck, it certainly played its part in ‘normalising’ SMS billing and wireless content.
While these channels were being built, many UK companies were developing products to fill them. Britain has always had a strong creative tradition – and this came to the fore again at the genesis of mobile content.
Not that we should overlook the contribution of the fifth operator, 3, which doesn’t even call itself a mobile network but a ‘mobile media’ company. Although 3 is international, its UK unit has been a genuine pioneer. It sold 20 million music videos in two years and introduced the idea of user-generated, user-rewarded video with SeeMeTV. The enthusiasm for mobile video has helped create conditions for producers such as Mobstar to flourish.
Finally, perhaps there’s something in the uniquely British paradox of individualism and propriety that makes the UK such fertile ground. The UK encourages entrepreneurialism but also has strong regulators; go ahead and do it, but be sensible, in other words.
Ofcourse, Business is combination of discipline,organization and opportunism and here's where UK people always have something to cheer about.
