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Features
Content Delivery >> Mobile Rah!
12/29/2005
As the number of cell phones on campus continues to rise, many schools are discovering newfound revenue by delivering sports-related mobile content at a premium.
Get your pompons ready, because in 2006, campus football and basketball stadiums aren’t the only place you’ll hear a school’s fight song. At many institutions, fight songs are now playing all over campus: on the quad, on the bus, in the cafeteria, and sometimes (though not the ideal situation) even in class. Just about any place you’d find a cellular phone, you can hear a school’s fight song in all of its rah-rah glory. Thanks to a new and lucrative form of content delivery, the songs actually come from the phones themselves, as special polyphonic ring tones that students can purchase, program to replace the phone’s traditional ring, and play every time they receive a call.
Students buy the ditties for anywhere from $2 to $3 apiece, and download them from a variety of Internet sites. But that’s only part of the transaction. Because the fight songs are licensed, colleges and universities receive a percentage of every sale. Taken individually, these fees don’t amount to more than 10 or 15 percent of the total price. As thousands and thousands of students sign up, however, colleges can see tidy new revenue streams. Rich Routman, VP of Business Development at Collegiate Images, one of the companies that licenses ring tone content, points to the revenue possibilities.
“If two years ago, you asked a college student what a ring tone or wallpaper was, they would have looked at you like you were crazy,” says Routman, whose organization is a subsidiary of the Collegiate Licensing Company in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. “Today, these kids simply can’t get enough of the stuff, and colleges and universities are cashing in.”
Though the mobile content business for higher education is still in its infancy, opportunities surrounding mobile content delivery could be veritable goldmines for colleges and universities. Those schools that have been licensing content for some time have earned tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of months since the industry took off in the summer of 2005. Other schools can’t sign up for the services quickly enough; across the country, campus VPs and marketing officials have been scrambling to get mobile content delivery programs up and running before the fall football season ends and the big-money winter basketball season begins.
Most of these deals are built around ring tones, still images (such as graphical-logo wallpaper for cell phone screens), and video clips; the basic trio of mobile content in higher education today. In some cases, however, trailblazing schools are also inking mammoth licensing agreements for anything and everything: sports scores via text-messaging, breaking news updates, sales on merchandise, and more. Though these latter deals are harder to find right now, Mike Merrill, chairman and CEO of content provider Smartphones Technologies, says they may be more common in the not-too-distant future, and that the sky’s the limit for what happens next.
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