Pipelines, consumption, raw material, ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). All this lingo indicates that somewhere the essence of story telling, narrative, play pattern, the experience is being lost. Two days spent at the inFor-Media India organised conference on Value Added Services for Telecom Technologies and a fear chills the spine. Is content getting commodified?

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The omnipresence of Mobile Devices (Currently primarily used as phones) across the globe leaves no doubt that the device is truly the third screen, but as Indian operators, content creators and aggregators try and realise the promised potential, something seems amiss.

The big issues facing the players in the value chain of Indian mobile applications, infotainment and entertainment are revenue share ratios, pricing models, consumer research and appreciation of each other's strengths.

The Big Daddy (the operators/networks) perspective is that since they (The operators) have already spent enormous amounts on infrastructure, equipment, licenses, backend and CRM, the content creators ought not to ask for more revenue share than already being offered and instead focus on growing the market and come up with more innovative 'Big Ideas' and 'Killer Aps'

The CP/SP (Content Provider/Service Provider) perspective is that since they are the folks that come up with the actual stuff that is going to be experienced which in turn will create consumer excitement, consumer loyalty and increase overall consumer adoption by way of refferals, forwards etc, they constitute a vital part in the value chain and therefore should have better revenue share, more data sharing on consumer feedback and more overall freedom and space in which to create.

To quote Dhruva Interactive's Rajesh Rao,"It would be great if all of us stakeholders in the value chain could work together to figure out content preferences, likes and dislikes, be more open with numbers, and share any bits of information that could help content creators improve their offering and hence expand the overall market"

"Holding back such information at this nascent stage could prove to be detrimental to the longterm objectives of achieving mass market penetration"

Besides the obvious lockjam there's more ground realities . Like the hundreds of devices that a content creator has to port and test content on before the product is ready and the marketing that has to be invested in and thought of. In a world where content is commodity, content creators are shying of creating their own characters, storylines and original concepts.

However not all is gloomy, even within the current scenario there are content creators spread across the country who are working on some great games, some great applications, comics, animation, entertainment and so on.

Mobile Content! sure the future's very bright, all that seems hazy right now is the way that leads into light.