Is the Future Mobile?

There's been so much said about the coming of HDTV and a future filled with massive home theatre systems, but the reality has been that smaller screens, and I mean much smaller screens, have outpaced the larger in both sales and acceptance. In Japan, where widescreen HDTV sets were the standard years ago, there are already 78 million mobile users and they are quickly consuming a lot of media content on their handsets. Some report that there are trains full of people who are watching live broadcasts on their phones.

Other parts of the world may not be so far ahead, but the trend seems the same everywhere. Smaller is catching on. People want more content, faster and they want t take it with them where they go.

The growth of this market is staggering. Apple's iPhone sold a reported 700,000 units in its three day launch weekend and with its new lower price is well on its way to 2,000,000 units in circulation. Business Week said of Apple, "...the iPhone has the potential for adding a totally new, $10 billion-a-year business within just a few years."

There are over a billion cell phones sold each year, and most modern units include screens capable of playing games, showing video, reading ebooks and, in Japan, even manga, a $20 million industry which seems to triple each year. Major companies are scrambling to create content for this brave new mobile world. TOKYOPOP, who published my own World of Hartz manga, is already the leader in the mobile manga market in America, and it is a market that is growing rapidly.

Video sharing sites like Youtube are already striking deals with major mobile content providers to make their content available on the smaller screens. Youtube viewing comes standard on every iPhone. This could quickly grow larger than TV, and some companies are paying major money for good content licenses.

Where's it all going to go? Your guess is as good as mine. Only time will tell. I do remember, though, when I got my hands on my first Sony PSP, I had tons of ideas for creating exclusive manga or anime content for that little device. I even built a site for it. Less than a year later, an underground PSP manga market exploded. Who knows how big it will get on the iPhone.

Tags: iPhone, Sony PSP, Manga, movies