MCW: Q&A with Brendan Dowling, founder of iO Global

Dowling set up the first pan-European MVNO as CCO of Metero Mobile Communications and operated Ireland's first ISP for mobile through his purchase of Meridian Communications. As non-executive chairman of Digital Versatile Media he focused on translating traditional media content for the new environments of mobile and online, and is the founder of the BT-backed platform iOGlobal.

What needs to happen for mobile TV to open up to a wider audience? If you want to supply any service, be it TV, music, movies, anything, you've got to look at how the consumer consumes these products today and ask how to add some value to the experience. For example, I shouldn't have to pay for a movie trailer - that's rubbish. But I'm happy to pay for the movie because it's premium content. So help me browse movie trailers on my mobile during my downtime for free. If I want to purchase it let me pay for it on my phone, but then allow me to watch it through my cable set-top box and on my plasma screen when I get home.
I might buy a music album on impulse and I'll pay whatever the full retail price is for it. Help me buy it on my phone, but don't deliver it to my mobile because I don't want to pay 10 times the price of the connectivity - deliver it to me on my DSL. Or I might take one track from the album right now on my phone, and then wait to get the whole album when I get home.
So it's about the value add, the price people will pay and also the advertising - a lot of the content we consume today is all paid for by advertisers.

So we'll see more and more ad-funded content? Oh, definitely, there's no doubt. The bulk of our content will eventually be paid for by advertisers.

People have been conditioned that way by the web, of course. Exactly, and mobile is a hugely valuable premium product. But charging GBP2.50 for a ringtone – it's outrageous and it's not sustainable. If consumers are going to buy music, and spend much more money, then they want full track downloads, they don't want ringtones. We've got to offer a value proposition that's some way close to what they get online or even in the digital or physical retail store - GBP10 or GBP15 for a music album. I shouldn't be paying GBP20 or GBP30 in a digital environment – in fact, I should pay less.

So what are the obstacles to this kind of thinking? Well, it was the technology, but it's no longer the technology. It's the commercial mindset and the incumbent legacy decisions that people have made - that is basically acting as a barrier to people opening up this industry and making it work.
Content owners kept telling us "we know how to build content, we know how to brand it, price it, we know that far better than these guys up there who are called mobile operators". They want the interface to load their content to the retailers because that is what they have always done. It's a crazy duplication of work for a couple of 100 people at an operator to do the content - and they're not even good at it.

Are operators are wasting their time getting directly involved with trying to produce the content themselves? Absolutely crazy. Completely nuts in my opinion. It's a totally different business and completely misaligned with being an operator in my view. In fairness to operators, they are very good marketing machines. Making phone calls, SMS etc - that's all a given in all networks the world over. So, ultimately, it comes down to good marketing and how they package and bundle and how they run their retail stores.

(c) MocoNews