The market for content and services on cell phones is expected to grow to $150 billion by 2011, as access to the Web while on the move becomes easier and faster, research from Informa Telecoms & Media showed.
The research firm said on Thursday that applications such as messaging led by traditional SMS messaging would still account for a lion's share of this market, generating over half of this revenue in 2011.
Informa predicted messaging services comprising SMS, multimedia messaging and instant messaging on cell phones will generate revenues worth $93 billion globally by 2011 from $60 billion last year and an expected $67.4 billion in 2007.
Entertainment services comprising games, music, TV, adult content and gambling would grow to $38 billion by 2011 from around $18.8 billion in 2006, it said.
"Mobile music will be a major contributor to the revenues achieved in the mobile entertainment market in the next five years, although its overall share of the market will fall from 40 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2011 as new forms of entertainment such as mobile TV and video services begin to gain consumer interest," Informa said in its report.
Not all of the explosion in new services, although helped by the availability of broadband speeds on cell phones, would go to cell phone operators.
"The introduction of a whole host of new players into the value chain presents new opportunities for growth in the mobile content and services market, whilst simultaneously posing a threat to mobile operators who face losing control of the billing relationship with their customers," Informa said.
It also forecast areas such as user-generated content, the rage of the Internet world in 2006, to come into the cell phone world in the years ahead. Informa forecast user-generated content and communities to be worth $13.2 billion by 2011.
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited.
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