Look at the incredible growth of Netflix over the last year!  9Million new subs… ( Approx 40% of their total subscribers).  They have embraced cross-platform convergence as a core strategy. Not only are they on every mobile platform that will port them today, they exist on as many platforms they can port to.  Try Nintendo, Try Playstations, X-boxes you name it Netflix is there… They started out as a humble service provider that leveraged snail-mail and now they are the top of the  rich-media content delivery business.

Media companies today need to really embrace cross-screening ( a term I created to describe the phenomena of users experiencing content on Multi-Screens.

Another company that has done a great job at the cross-screen strategy is New York Times.   Not only they marketing everywhere that they are leveraging all screens for users to consume content ( pay once and get all, they are advertising this just as well).  I see their Digital Subscriber Ads in the New York Subway everyday, and here is an ad that I recently saw in the CBSlocal.com website.

Not only is NewYork Times building themselves very strongly across all mediums, what is equally important is how much emphasis they put on Mobile.  Just recently, New York Times was awarded the 2011 Webby for the Best Mobile News Website . In today’s landscape media companies need to not only embrace mobile, but make it a very strong priority like Netflix and NYTimes.

If we look at Comcast, they do have a strong mobile strategy but as media consumption patterns are changing it is critical they embrace all platforms.   My gut tells me that they should just buy Hulu and start to change the game with Online content distribution streaming in a bigger way as well.  Put Hulu a bit out of their misery by trying to do it alone with those tough Networks.   Netflix has evolved with those relationships that started with physical plastic boxes with Tape, then DVD’s (some may say this could be considered an advantage), but they got the business model right and have expanded like crazy.   Hulu on the other hand, has had an uphill battle from the start with the content providers.  My recommendation for Comcast is to buy Hulu and start to change the game a bit with Netflix!  Make it cross-screen for all Digital Subscribers…

We have entered 2011 and I have to say the first decade did fly by rather quickly for us in the mobile industry.   I am a big fan of JWT and their things to watch deck.  I thought I would share it and highlight the top 10 in my mind for those realigning and creating a  mobile strategy this year.

This is something that caught my eye.  With all the talk of 4G, LTE and the present constant search for bandwidth, are consumers in for another cost hit moving forward? Yes- we can always go to Wifi mode when it is convenient, but still the costs of tethering with mobile devices jumps significantly when we get to the 2Gigs and above.  Mobile Video has been the high-light of many discussions as the next wave of killer content delivered to mobile and at a recent event in NYC on the future of Television all of the mobile panelists have said that mobile video is here and 2010 is really the year of mobile!

However,  according to Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela ( in a RRW article)  director of wireless research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, the problem is part of what he called the “too-much-data paradox”. Dr. Valenzuela spoke on the topic last week as well at the Texas Wireless Summit, describing a situation wherein the constant push for smartphone adoption will prove unsustainable for carriers ( 50% of users will have smartphones in North America by 2012. Imagine it will be Android version 5 and iOS6?)

“There’s a tremendous amount of relevant content on great devices at reasonably affordable rates,” explained Valenzuela, “however, networks have started crashing under this pressure. It’s no surprise that just in New York, to address the iPhone, AT&T is spending billions of dollars.”

The problem, Valenzuela pointed out, is that just 10% of all smartphone users are using the majority of data. With current smartphone adoption rates, carriers are looking at a situation where soon cost of providing the data being consumed will surpass profit. Dave Gill, the senior director of mobile media at Nielsen, also spoke at the summit and offered similar conclusions.

“You’ve got to somehow throttle the top end of the spectrum here to make money in this market,” said Gill, offering the following chart of mobile data use.

With the main threshold of 2Gigs today, where will this all go when we really start to bring more video and rich media into the mix?

I believe that the key to all of this will fall on some kind of  needed balance with more automatically enabled Wifi services in highly congested areas of NYC and the like.  As Wifi becomes a standard component in mobile devices, the ability to automatically switch between the mobile networks and the Wifi networks in a plan that is best mapped out to a users data plan seems like a logical step.

Will we move to metered pricing?  or will there be a cost increase in data across the board based on the supply and demand methodology of basic economics thus driving up the desire of Carriers to again start to charge more for data.

So even though we can say that 2010 was a significant year in mobile, in my mind until there is more liquidity of the data networks, we still have a bit longer to go before mobile at its prime is really unleashed.