Carriers Need To Embrace Sideloading, Or Be Threatened By It—ISuppli

location based services

By James Quintana Pearce - Tue 29 May 2007 11:40 PM PST

The increased practice of sideloading content onto mobile phones is going to cause problems for carriers keen to sell their own content, claims iSuppli. Sideloading will increase as more handsets have common interfaces such as USB and Bluetooth—iSuppli estimates 764 million handsets shipped in 2010 will have USB connectivity and Bluetooth, WLAN and NFC will also be in a significant number of handsets. ISuppli expects more carriers to take a multi-platform approach, such as Alltel’s sideloading music application which lets customers buy from online store eMusic and easily transfer the music to handsets. Isupplie predicts that many users will use both sideloading and OTA methods of obtaining content, depending on their needs at a particular time. So offering sideloading solutions make sense—it means that when consumers do sideload content they stay with the carrier, they’re less likely to churn (because they’re more satisfied), and they’ll probably use more content.

Po