Apple’s Role in the Mobile Content Market

The merge of Macromedia with Adobe promises a new era of mobile content development, while Microsoft is preparing for the release Windows 5.0 for mobile. But where does Apple stands in all this?

While it might have gone un-noticed to some, Apple plays an important role in the mobile content publishing world. Have a look at Mobile, a section of Apple’s website. Not only Apple has entered the scenes on mobile content since a while, but it is in actual fact an important milestone in this field—Apple has adapted QuickTime to the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards enabling also the QuickTime based applications to create mobile content, such as Adobe’s very own GoLive CS2. Thus Apple is definitely playing no small role in one of the fastest growing markets in multimedia publishing.

Talking about multimedia, while QuickTime can be used on its own for the creation of mobile content, its combined use with Final Cut Pro video and audio creation capabilities makes for an almost unbeatable pair in this field. Create your content with Final Cut Pro, make it compliant with 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards with QuickTime and you are ready to go—you can have your new video, screensaver, you name it, ready to play on your mobile.

The Catch

By adopting QuickTime to 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards, Apple opened the way to many possibilities not only for themselves, but also for other companies. As Apple says:

So what is the catch? The catch lays in the words “3G” and “high-speed mobile network”. Unless you have a 3G (3rd Generation) mobile device, the wonderful content created by QuickTime is totally unusable, because of the lack of support in other mobiles. 3G mobile devices can still be quite expensive, but as the mobile culture sinks in more and more in our society, the cost of 3rd Generation devices will decrease, making this diverse and interesting world available to an increasing number of mobile phone owners. Depending on what country you live in, mobile service providers might even offer free 3G mobiles with their contracts.

Mobiles are no longer just a way to communicate to someone through a normal phone call or an SMS. With the new capabilities that technology brings to these little devices, an array of entertainment, informative and useful services are waiting for you to be discovered and used. Think about it next time you are about to make a purchase.