Ringback tones rising
Answer Tones, Caller Tunes, Ringback Tones - all names for the same mobile content product which allows a consumer to customize the ‘ringing’ sound heard by someone calling them appears to be making strides. Brought to the US a couple of years ago after successful trials by Koran telecom heavyweight SKTelecom, US carriers had high hopes for the product. Requiring a massive in network integration, the systems cost millions of dollars to deploy. Content sales including music and celebrity voices and subscription service fees drive the revenue for the carrier. I expect consumer land-line Ringback deployments to make their way to market in 2007. Most likely ATT and/or Verizon given their consumer land-line and mobile offerings.
By Colin Gibbs
Ringback tones continue to gain traction even as the U.S. ringtone market plateaus, according to new figures from M:Metrics.
The market research firm found that the popularity of ringback tones—music clips that a caller hears instead of a traditional ring before the person being called answers the phone—more than tripled last year, exploding from 2.4 million subscribers in January to nearly 8 million subscribers in November. The application continued to gain ground in Europe, as well, growing at a rate of roughly 150 percent in Germany and the United Kingdom during the year.
Meanwhile, ringtones remain popular, if not as lucrative. Nearly 7 percent of all U.S. wireless subscribers have made their own ringtones, M:Metrics found, as the percentage of users purchasing ringtones slipped from 10 percent of wireless consumers to less than 9 percent.
“The rise in ringbacks indicates that personalization remains an important motivation for mobile content purchases,” said M:Metrics entertainment analyst Jen Wu. “While we see a decrease in ringtone purchases, we do wee an increase in user-created ringtones. Since it’s impossible to hack a ringback tone, this growing market is not threatened by piracy and end-user savvy.”
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