Fun on the run
A new report from Juniper Research has put a figure on the booming mobile entertainment market. Thanks to the surge in mobile device adoption, the market for stuff like games, apps and a surprisingly wide variety of vice reached $33 billion last year, and is forecast to top $54 billion by 2015.
Given the explosion of the mobile device market in recent years, nobody will be surprised to see mobile entertainment growing rapidly, but it's still interesting to see a figure put on the size of the market and its growth. To put these figures into some perspective, Microsoft has averaged annual revenues of around $60 billion for the past three years.
"We've witnessed a quite dramatic evolution of the mobile entertainment market over the past few years, in terms of type of content, scale of content and how that content is monetised," said report author Dr Windsor Holden. "The challenge for the players across the redefined mobile ecosystem is to recognise how best to leverage their strengths to ensure that their respective revenue streams are optimised."
This announcement is designed to promote a new report from Juniper and, just like the quote above, is necessarily vague and generalised. But here are three other ‘key findings':
- Despite the erosion of the ringtone market, mobile music will remain the largest single contributor to mobile entertainment content revenues over the next five years
- The fastest growing product sector will be mobile gambling, followed by social media
- On a regional basis, Far East & China will continue to account for the largest share of revenues, followed by Western Europe
In an earlier report, Juniper had also predicted that augmented reality will generate 1.4 billion downloads by 2015. Make of that what you will.
