FEATURE: Peer-to-Peer Mobile Content Sharing

Cascada's Brian Flanagan makes the case for peer-to-peer content sharing.

Mobile networks uniquely provide the elements necessary for a legal and billable peer-to-peer system for both content and applications. While there are challenges, such as diverse technology platforms, carrier networks and infrastructure, the revenue opportunities are proving incentive enough for companies to consider this distribution model.

While varied content for mobile devices is clearly plentiful, cashing in on potential revenues from game downloads has been a sizable challenge for game developers, publishers and wireless carriers. Despite the rise in popularity of mobile games, the challenge lies with getting the content into the hands of the mass market. Only 5 percent of consumers have actually downloaded a game to a handset, according to a survey by SKOPOS on behalf of mobile games company I-Play. In fact, in some regions only 30 percent of mobile users are aware downloading games to their phones is possible--despite significant efforts by carriers and publishers to raise awareness of these services.

There is a real opportunity to take advantage of subscribers already using game downloads and other advanced data services and empowering them to convert their non-using friends. The SKOPOS survey reported that a majority of users would download a game if a friend recommended it. Like the shampoo commercial, if someone tells two friends about a game, they will tell two friends and so on: pretty quickly you've got a critical mass of people who have purchased that game. Additionally, because they now know how to download content and are familiar with the process, selling subsequent games to those people is an easier task.

As the mobile industry is painfully aware, distributing applications from phone to phone is not at all like the PC world, where files can be sent between people and will almost certainly work. Within the mobile space, there are two key challenges to be overcome.

The first of these is that the sender generally is not aware of their peer's carrier. Ensuring content sharing across carrier borders is key to the success of any peer to peer network. As was observed when cross-carrier text messaging came to North America, interoperability is critical to usage adoption and the very success of any service where a person-to-person interaction takes place. Also, most carriers want to collect revenue for the subscriber's purchases or have a preferred list of portals with which they would prefer downloads to take place.

The second challenge, which all J2ME developers are painfully aware of, is that mobile devices each have unique characteristics, meaning that specific versions of applications are required for each and every device. These versions may only be available through a specific portal or location that needs to be updated over time as carrier/portal relationships change.

Managing and updating a matrix with all these different variables, and the various relationships with the carriers and portals, can get complex for everyone. Many publishers and portals want to do this. However, most have backed away from the development effort either during the planning phase, or at some point during development when the complexities and challenges to overcome had them straying too far from their core competency of developing games and applications that they can sell.

The good news is that by working with a company that is focused on the core service of mediating these exchanges, a publisher or carrier can reap the rewards without significant effort or cost. New technology solutions are now available that use existing network infrastructure to solve this challenge. Developers and publishers add a small segment of code to an existing or new application and then follow their standard deployment processes of porting and testing. In addition, because there is no change made on the storefront side, there is no need to adjust existing revenue sharing agreements of reconciliation. A consumer subscribing to a Canadian carrier's services therefore could pass a game onto a friend in the U.S., while ensuring the recipient's carrier (and the publisher) receives revenue for the shared game.

This type of technology enables operators, publishers and distributors to share content between the more than 889 million mobile devices that Ovum research estimates will be in the market by year end 2005--without having to invest millions of dollars in infrastructure builds. In addition, the TAG system supports almost all of the more than 350 different in-market J2ME enabled phones.

By using existing infrastructure and open standards, carriers and publishers can try out peer-to-peer distribution without capital expenditures or integration projects.

Brian Flanagan is the director of product management at Cascada Mobile.