Future of Media Summit Blog

Clearly the iPhone is changing the way that the Australian audience thinks about consuming products via their mobile devices. Where arguably the technology has been available for some time, getting your head around the application of that technology - getting excited about it - that is a different matter.
We discussed the potential of mobile as both a medium for consuming media product and a tool for creating it. As Stephen Quinn from Deakin University suggested, the mobile sphere has an enormous potential to reach people, particularly younger people, like never before.
Viacorp's Ian Gardiner made the point that the Australian mobile carriers are desperately trying to maintain a kind of "walled garden", restricting access and hoping to protect their revenue accordingly, but perhaps "Carriers need o stop trying to be media companies, because they're bad at it," as was suggested by Christo Van Egmond from Stripe.
The carriers might be trying to shore up their revenue models, retain ultimate control over content (however questionable the quality), but is there a real, substantial market for the content they are fighting so fiercely to protect?
Generally the group believes there is - at least for certain content, and assuming Australian carriers loosen the leash in terms of download limits...
Diverging for a second, does anyone reading this know the details and dynamics of the deal that lead to Telstra acquiring rights to distribute the iPhone and why 3 was left out? Would love more info on that.
Anyway, returning to the point at hand, there is some debate over whether mobiles can compete with free content on larger screens over the internet.
First foremost there needs to be appropriate infrastructure in place to accommodate the desire to view any content, to make that experience enjoyable and convenient, but once that is established, really the group agreed that there should be no "for mobile" content. It should all just be content, and platform agnostic. Some sites/uses will lend themselves more heavily to mobile - Van Egmond suggests sport results and breaking news - but really if I want to shop online, if I want to view YouTube, if I want to watch a streamed TV show, I should be able to do it.
Mike Zimmerman from Technology Venture Partners suggests carriers might find some success and continued control if they begin to supplement subscription/pay-per-usage models with ad support, so offer a cut-rate cap plan in exchange for eyeballs during use time or SMS/MMS ads.
Ultimately, as wifi becomes increasingly prolific and accessible and various different enabling technologies undermine the telcos' ambitions, perhaps as Gardiner suggests "the carriers are doomed".