The Open Mobile Alliance has begun work on a key standardization initiative, proposed by Comverse, to create a well-defined application programming interface between carriers and content providers.

Supported and promoted by a number of leading carriers and vendors, the initiative can help open the ring-back tone environment to off-deck content providers. The new OMA specification will significantly affect mobile advertising.

"The industry challenge at the moment is to define a standard way of allowing the main players in the ecosystem, meaning operators and direct-to-consumer content providers, to smoothly connect to each other, and allow the off-deck ring-back tone market to take off as we've seen with other content services," said Meidad Sharon, associate vice president of Comverse, Waltham, MA.

"The strategy behind this initiative is to open the ring-back tone market to the off portal, and with this to create a new growth driver for both the ting-back tone and off-portal markets," he said.

"This can be achieved by addressing the needs of the operators, content providers and end users."

Value-added services need to be heavily promoted to end users in order to drive penetration and usage.

In order to allow off-deck players to connect to the carriers' deck and sell ring-back Tones, there are some functional elements that have to be supported:

â?¢ Standard Interface and Methodology for Content Upload
â?¢ Standard Interface and Methodology for Content Purchase and user
Activation
â?¢ Standard Interface and Methodology for Reporting Scheme

Since each carrier probably has a different vendor, or in some cases a home-grown ring-back tone system, it makes the connectivity between carriers to content providers challenging.

At the moment, each and every content provider has to integrate to each one of the carriers' ring-back tones systems for all of the three functionalities: uploading content, purchase/activation and reporting.

The multiple integration efforts are currently the show stopper for off-deck ring-back tone deployment, because of increased efforts and time-to-market

"Operators can't focus their marketing efforts on single services in the long run," Mr. Sharon said. "And so far, ring-back tones were the only content not being sold off-portal, meaning by those third-party content providers, but only by carriers.

"Success of ring-back tones was completely correlated to the operator's ability or will to focus on that service," he said.

Third-party content providers, which represent an increasing share of the total mobile content market, are seeing their revenues stagnating and declining and are eager to find new sources of revenues.

In order to invest in a service, content providers must be sure their potential target audience is as wide as possible.

"This means they don't want to sell a service only to one operator's subscribers in a given country," Mr. Sharon said. "In fact, they want to reach the biggest subscriber-base in a given country, meaning multiple operator connectivity."

The new standard will let content providers to connect with the same standard interface to all carriers.

End users need three major things in order to buy content services.

The first is to be aware of their existence, second is variety and relevancy of content and third is intuitive user experience.

By opening ring-back tones to off-deck, Comverse creates a win-win situation for all players in the value chain.

Comverse's Fun Dial ring-back tone service lets users personalize network tones with music and content to entertain callers before the call is answered.

"The implications of a smooth connection are lower costs, faster time to market and full interoperability," Mr. Sharon said.

"The standard interface can be used as a generic interface for any service, such as mobile advertising," he said. "It would be able to be used for ads and campaigns and to be uploaded to a mobile ad system."