Consumers Want Cheaper, Faster, Clearer Mobile MediaConsumers Want Cheaper, Faster, Clearer Mobile Media

Mobile media's popularity is on the rise but the industry still has to improve image quality, bandwidth capacity, and the overall consumer experience.

BambooMediaCasting surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers in March and found that most consumers think mobile video subscriptions will be too expensive and those who don't think it will be too costly believe that image quality will be poor.

The company provides scheduled push delivery of subscription content to mobile customers. Its survey found that 51% of respondents believe the service will cost too much, and 45.5% of those who thought the cost would be acceptable predicted poor image quality. Twenty-seven percent thought loading speeds would be a problem, and another 17% said the process would be too complex. Ten percent expected limited content choice.

"Mobile media technology has clearly come a long way in a very short time, but as these findings suggest, we as an industry need to ensure that consumers have a quality experience every step of the way," Guy Morag, CEO of Bamboo MediaCasting, said in a statement released Thursday. "The mobile platform is unique -- it's not TV and it's not the PC. Carriers and service providers stand to benefit, the closer we all come to providing solutions that don't involve unacceptable compromises."

ABI Research predicts that 3G network adoption and broad consumer interest will help increase the number of mobile content subscribers to 462 million globally worldwide over the next five years, while IDC predicts U.S. mobile video users to number 25 million by 2011. Juniper Research forecasts that mobile entertainment revenues will increase from $20 billion to $65 billion by 2011.

Bamboo MediaCasting analyzed the demographics of those who did not think the cost of mobile video would be too high.

The company found that women are more likely than men to worry about image quality (48% compared with 43%) and loading speeds (29% compared with 25%), but men are more concerned about limited content (13% compared with 7%).

Thirty-six percent of those between 35 and 44 years old said that speed is their top concern, while 23% of those between 45 and 54 worried about speed, the survey found. The numbers drop more among those between the ages of 55 and 64 (19%) and even further among those over 65 (10%).

People in the Northeast are more likely to cite image quality as an issue (53%) than their counterparts in the South (41%), according to the survey.