Mobile entertainment faces issues

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The Bell is Ringing on the cellular phone ring tone subscription industry

Cellular phone ring tones have become a global industry, worth US$ 4 billion. Ring tones are offered at considerable cost, using marketing methods that have been called dubious. The British High Court recently upheld adjudication by the Advertising Standards Authority, which found that children had unwittingly run up large phone bills through hidden weekly subscription charges.

Aggressive marketing of cellular phone content sales has come into disrepute. The largest and most aggressive ring tone subscription vendor Jamba AG of Germany is a subsidiary of VeriSign. The Advertising Standards Authority has recently put a 9pm restriction on its advertisements, which were shown on 40000 occasions during a single month on British television. The law firm Callahan, McCune & Willis of San Diego, CA has filed class action suite against Jamba. With weekly subscription charges of GB?3 it the company is cashing in hundreds of millions of Dollars, Euros and Pounds, much of this from indebted young consumers. British mobile phone content delivery platform Bango.net raised GB?7 million on AIM this year with investors expecting huge returns ? still their biggest source of revenue are ring tone sales.

Investors are confident, consumer protection advocates angry and technology is simply progressing. Acon Digital Media has released on September 28th, 2005 a new software application helping consumers to convert any piece of music into a real music ring tone in less than three minutes, available from http://www.myringading.com. The application called ?My Ringading? makes creating truly unique ring tones and transferring them to a mobile phone a child?s play - infrared, cable or Bluetooth as well as cost effective WAP uploads are all available at a mouse click. Technological progress means that the many complaints by households that have spent more than US$19.90 are rapidly finding an effective and economical solution.

http://www.academici.com/hp/Klaas_Brumann/
Yes, I do have a child with a mobile phone!

Posted by: kbrumann   Posted on: 09/28/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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