Ovi Store gains momentum but Sony plans its own mobile shopfront

MOST READ
LATEST NEWS

EVENTS

Join Orange, Amazon and Google at the Open Mobile Summit London May 29-30

MARKET PLACE

Carrier Broadband Performance: Africa & Middle East

Voice over LTE: Market Analysis and Forecasts

Advertize your telecoms job

JOBS

Experienced Event Organiser

Ovi Store gains momentum but Sony plans its own mobile shopfront

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 23 November, 2009

The application store battle continues to heat up, and Sony is the latest to show its hand, announcing its return to online content with Sony Online - initially for PCs and music players, but with a mobile storefront expected next year. It is not clear how this would integrate, if at all, with Sony Ericsson's existing PlayNow store and content services, and while confusion mounts, Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store continue to chip away a little at the dominant iPhone App Store.

Ovi Store has been the slow burner since it was launched earlier this year, partly because the flagship handsets to push its profile only shipped recently, so it made its debut on older models. Now it is making headway, with downloads in October up by 70% compared to September's tally. According to Bill Perry, services marketing manager for Forum Nokia, there are over 100 devices in 20 countries that can access Ovi, with the N97 and the 5800 being the most popular, and the average user downloading eight items.

Other statistics that point to a steady growth for Ovi Store include its broad international spread, in keeping with Nokia's strategy of stealing a serious march on rivals in emerging economies, where its handsets give it huge market reach. So it now boasts active Ovi users in 180 countries and developers in 65, with local content and language support and mobile billing in eight countries so far - the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Italy and Russia - and more than 20 slated for the end of the first quarter of 2010. These will include India, Indonesia and Egypt, which even without local language support are already in the top 10 Ovi Store markets, (as are Saudi Arabia and Thailand).

According to Perry, the much criticized 'redownload' facility is now working, and Ovi Store will be embedded on most Symbian S60 and S40 devices from this quarter.

Over at Sony, the company said it plans to launch an online marketplace selling music, movies, books and other media optimized for mobile devices. Speaking at a strategy meeting in Tokyo, executives said they would focus initially on an integrated experience with Sony's mobile media players, taking on iTunes head-on. Some of the work has been headed up by former Apple executive Tim Schaaf, whom Sony poached three years ago to rejuvenate software efforts. Sony's previous online store effort, Sony Connect, was withdrawn last year following lackluster performance.

Sony aims to differentiate its new offering by tapping into social networking and user generated content trends, for instance by allowing users to upload personal content in the same way as Google YouTube. And it is likely to add a mobile apps marketplace open to third party developers, like App Store. "Sony has been too focused on hardware," Osamu Hirose, an analysts at Tokai Tokyo Research Center, told BusinessWeek. "It has to focus on networked products and delivering digital entertainment to consumers." Of course, Sony's other point of difference is that it has home-produced content to offer, from its movie studios, music units and other divisions. Kazuo Hirai, EVP for networked products and services, said: "That I think is where our core competence lies, and that's a differentiator for Sony."

Pages: 1 | 2