January 06, 2009
M/C Venture Partners: Communication and Media Industry to Benefit in 2009
By Shamila Janakiraman, TMCnet Contributor
M/C Venture Partners released the results of its study on the communication and media industry trends for 2009 and although the economic downturn will affect growth and innovation in most areas, it is expected to create more investment opportunities in the communications and media sectors.
The industry will benefit from consumer segmentation, increase in enterprise bandwidth requirements, more usage of virtualization and increase in adoption of personal mobile services according to Venture.
M/C Venture Partner studied the industry trends to discover investment opportunities in the communications, media and information technology sectors. The firm detected a shift in consumer spending towards wireless services with replacement of landline services. Consumers are trying to rationalize their communication services expenses leading to greater value for mobility.
James Wade, Managing General Partner of M/C Venture Partners said, “The fundamental characteristics of mobile wireless services make them increasingly essential in tight economic times with customers choosing more pre-paid or unlimited service offerings over maintaining their landline services. This trend will affect wireless operators at the expense of telcos and cable companies.”
The success of smartphones will drive consumer adoption of mobile data services. Consumers will move beyond SMS and will use their mobile devices for internet, video, social networking, maps and other data intensive applications.
Service providers will use segmentation of consumer offerings to increase demand and profitability. Cable, telephony and wireless markets will improve in 2009 with growth seen in prepaid and unlimited offerings.
Carriers will face more competition and will introduce more differentiation with innovative products and services. Network operators will revise their network deployment strategies according to changing usage patterns to increase profits.
Innovations in the area of mobility-driven video content will lead to new strategies for improving performance to meet demands. These changes include distributed antenna systems, wireless backhaul, higher capacity access concentrator devices, increased use of fiber networks and better capacity planning by network operators.
Enterprises are expected to lower costs but improve upon operational flexibility with virtualization techniques, enabling IT innovation.
Traditional media outlets will be replaced by measurable media and tools for effective media usage. With improvements in technology, out-of-home advertisements will target smaller and more specific consumer segments making them more local and direct.
The variety of Internet-capable devices and low monthly subscription costs will drive demands despite the present economic situation. The increase in demand will be due to low-cost, mobile broadband-capable notebook PCs with small form factors and “out-of-the-box” connectivity.
