The phone giant and IMG/TWI teamed up to develop the Essential Sports Service to deliver sports images, news, updates and audio commentary to sports' fans mobile phones.
In total five operators in Asia Pacific and Europe offered the individually branded services to their MMS subscribers – resulting in more than 14,000 users signing up.
Said Mark Selby, head of mobile division, IMG/TWI: “This project has clearly demonstrated the value of MMS for sports content services.
"When linked with SMS and WAP, MMS enables comprehensive, timely and exciting content to be consumed by sports fans. Mobile data services can now genuinely deliver the emotion of sport and generate new income for mobile operators."
Added Esa Harju, director, marketing, Nokia Networks: "For Nokia this trial has been immensely valuable as it confirms our belief that sports, as a prime example of branded content, will be one of the big drivers in mobile multimedia. Already today, mobile data services generates around EUR40bn annual business globally, and we expect this to grow to over EUR180bn by 2007.”
All the participating operators, including CSL in Hong Kong, DTAC in Thailand, M1 and StarHub in Singapore, and O2 in the UK, confirm that the service trial has had a positive impact on their data usage and revenues, and provided a useful experience and platform in building their future MMS service offering.
Over 90 percent of the users in the trial expressed satisfaction with the services they had received during the trial. Content was structured for each geographic territory on the basis of local sports interest.
Sports covered included football, golf, tennis, athletics, cricket, motor sports, badminton and horse racing.
