IP Democracy: Treating the Mobile Platform as a New Medium

The New York Times’ Lorne Manley has this in-depth piece today on mobile media, with a primary focus on Trip Hawkins’ start-up Digital Chocolate. Hawkins, former Apple employee and founder of Electronic Arts, is no kid but he has an iconoclastic view of mobile media content development.

Hawkins has focused his well-financed company on low-tech, social networking applications that take advantage of the mobile platform’s unique characteristics.

That resulting connection, that social interaction, can be much more lucrative than costly, classic content, in Mr. Hawkins’s estimation. The first big mobile hit will be a completely original creation, he contends. “If you’re going to really establish something as a new medium, you can’t do that with content that is derivative and a second-class version of another medium,” Mr. Hawkins said.

This approach differs from that of major media companies that are looking to leverage the mobile device as an extended outlet for hit content created for television or other traditional media.

Needless to say, plenty of entertainment and media companies do not share that pointed opinion. From Hollywood to the Bristol, Conn., campus of ESPN, companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt their current brands in television, movies, games and news and information to the tiny screens of mobile phones, and creating new programming.

The article makes a point worth underscoring: this is a new medium and it makes no sense to expect it to behave like the old media. (This idea that mobile platforms or the Internet or other new distribution outlets will replace or pale in comparison or won’t stack up or whatever to TV, for example, must be stamped out.)

There is some common ground between wildcatters like Mr. Hawkins and Fortune 500 executives in trying to crack the elusive code for moneymaking products in this new medium. In theory, everyone agrees that merely plunking down reformatted programming from other media, like television, does not work because that does not make the most of the mobile phone’s particular attributes, like text messaging.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 21, 2006 11:49 AM to IP Democracy