American cell-phone use continues to climb, with a reported two-thirds of American homes having at least one. How wide a field that indicates for adult cell-phone content depends upon how cell-phone carriers regulate their airwaves and how content providers adhere to those regulations.
Charles Golvin, a principal analyst for Market research firm Forrester Research says that American home cell phone growth continues to defy previous predictions that the cell phone market either hit or approached its saturation point. He also said it doesn’t mean consumers are as happy with their mobile phone service providers as they are with the phone itself.
"Despite carriers' focus on improving their networks and customer service, customer satisfaction has declined over the past three years and hovers around 50 percent in key categories like customer service and call dependability," Golvin says.
The Forrester survey results were released almost two weeks after Brickhouse Mobile struck a licensing deal with Wicked Pictures to bring Wicked content to mobile phones. Brickhouse will act as a kind of broker between the adult studio and mobile-phone carriers, and the company hopes some other adult content producers are willing to jump in sooner rather than later.
Brickhouse President Clinton Fayling said such deals would secure adult studios obeying prospective carriers’ standards while assuaging carriers leery that they might be opening a door to the hardest of the hardcore. He also believes cell-phone porn could outperform standard personal computer porn if cell carriers are willing to let adult material go over their airwaves.
“I think it’s going to be huge,” SEXMoney.com North American Marketing Manager Matthew Sclier told AVNOnline.com on April 15. “They’re predicting by 2008 that it’s going to be in the billions. That’s a very large number. It’s already being used by other countries right now. There is no way around it. We’re a couple of years behind Europe in general; we’re still growing into acceptance of [cell phones]. We’re playing catch-up. The handset makers are just now getting into the game.”
Sclier said the most likely scenario would involve mobile carriers setting their filtering policies, and content providers working to adhere to them if they want any sort of adult acceptance on the cell-phone airwaves.
“They regulate text messaging now,” he says. “Porn is not looked kindly upon by the telecoms. They’re not really accepting yet. I think once the market [shows them] more money being made in the porn segment of it, [and] they figure out a way to protect children, it will grow. They’re in a very strange place now, trying to figure it all out.”
Forrester determined that once planned consolidations are finished, the nation’s top three cell phone service providers will be Cingular (28 percent), Verizon (27 percent), and Sprint/Nextel (15 percent), reaching seven out of 10 cell-phone households among the three of them.
The Forrester study, covering a reported 5,600 households, also showed that buyer priorities remain constant over the past two years in spite of added features like digital cameras and color screens to cell phones. Less than one out of 10 cell-phone users surveyed said a camera was an important part of how they decided to buy a cell phone, while the basic features—unit price, battery life, easy usage—remained the top priorities.
But wireless data capabilities like email access and photo sharing grew in importance among those same survey subjects, Forrester says, with 20 percent of those surveyed—a 39 percent hike over 2002 study results—saying having data capacity was just as important as the basic service and usage features.
Forrester also determined that the youngest age group studied—18-to-24-year-olds—passed the 25-to-34-year-old age group as the group most likely to have a cell phone, with the only age group showing less than half using cell phones was the 65 and older group.
