Consumers are seeking out original content on their phones - as long as they know what it costs them, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.

In the sleepy month of August, some newspapers embarked on a series of polls of what young people want from content on the TV, the mobile and the web. They produced surprising results.

In the United States, the LA Times/Bloomberg polled young people and found they were none too keen on watching television programmes, or "mobisodes", on mobile phones.

That's despite most major entertainment companies having mobisode strategies. And it's also despite another poll turning up the less surprising result that Disney is the world's eighth most important brand, a valuation based in part on its mobile entertainment strategy.

In the United States, Disney is a mobile phone company selling phones with Mickey's ears on them, and providing services that allow parents to dictate when children can use their mobile phones and what content they can access.

In an area of life where parents may feel threatened by their children's access to technology, Disney is responding to a wide range of their needs, and priming a market for mobile content.

Over the summer, Disney was joined by another American company SMS.ac in trying to make mobile more friendly to the sceptics who regard it as a medium for the attention-deficits among us. SMS is calling for greater transparency in how mobile content producers charge for their services.

The reason is, mobile operators have largely failed to promote content in the way they first chose to do so - up until recently, mobile network operators regarded their relationship with the consumers as sacrosanct. Content providers always had to work at an arms length.

That is beginning to change, and change poses risks for consumers and opportunities for content providers.

"There is a phenomenon known as bill shock," says mobile content expert Ajit Joakar, who runs futuretext, a London-based publisher specialising in mobile. "People tune into mobile episodes or content but they only do it once. Then they take a look at their bill and get the shock."

Bill shock began taking hold with ring tones and picture downloads and is not necessarily attributable to network operators such as Vodafone and O2.

Children who see an advert for a free ringtone website that they can visit with their mobile phone, have been discovering that while the ringtone is free, it can cost a euro or more to access the page where the ringtone is located. Those inclined to browse those pages can easily rack up huge phone bills.

Are free ringtone sites the easiest way to rob the children's candy? I put it to an O2 customer care operator: "Anybody who wants to take money off kids right now, they should set up one of these ringtone sites?" And the answer is: "Yes."

This tendency of the mobile content industry to beguile the user before exposing them to bill shock is, according to Joakar, holding back content opportunities in mobile telephony, and that's what SMS.ac, and European content distributors like bango.com, are trying to change.

"There is a big market for content on the mobile phone," says Joakar. "You can see it in South Korea and Japan, but outside those areas the biggest problem holding back mobile content is that people really don't know what they are paying."

That's why to date the biggest seam of mobile phone content finds its way onto video aggregation sites such as YouTube, that tend to be accessed from a PC.

"Users are generating content with their mobile phones and what people haven't properly realised is that is what is driving the phenomenal success of YouTube and flickr," says Joakar.

AN OPINION POLL in the UK during the summer revealed that children aged 16-24 are turning off TV in favour of the internet (no surprise there) and that the favourite downloadable content was stuff for the mobile phone.

So what's happening in Ireland? Steve McCormack runs Wildwave, a company that provides exclusive video content to mobile networks around the world.

Steve observes that the initial attraction of mobile phones was for immediate and news-style information. "Results, goals, that kind of thing," he says. "Goals from the premiership, sports action. The first wave was immediate."

That's starting to change. "The pattern we've seen in mobile content lately - especially video - is that the users initially tended to gravitate towards the big well-known TV brands, MTV, Sky etc, but then as they realise this content is pretty much the same as what they consume through existing media, the novelty of the mobile video begins to wear off and they go looking for different and new content. This is when more specialised content that is specific to mobile or has limited availability elsewhere tends to grow in popularity."

Which could explain why Fox, when they looked to replicate the enormous success of the hit TV series Prison Break across the mobile network, decided not to use the actual TV series. Prison Break mobisodes do not even use the same actors.

The story delves into the conspiracy that put Lincoln Burrows, star of the TV series, into prison, but without using Lincoln Burrows.

It's sponsored by Toyota and the mobisodes are downloadable at Toyota's website. I have to say my attention was drawn more to the clunky-looking red Yaris that the female lead drives than it was to the action.

Clearly mobile content is beginning to find a longer form, and an audience, but some of what we see in viewer numbers might be illusory.

Sms.ac provide a platform for developers and content providers to create new content from and for mobile phones. SMS works with mobile operators around the globe and its objective is to create global audiences for niche mobile content.

There are around 1,700 content channels on Sms.ac. Though many are personal or poorly produced, the medium is beginning to attract major names. Scott Adams's Dilbert cartoons are there and other content companies are aggregating high-quality content from around the web and from podcasts for the mobile. These include iTunes top comedy sites, IMDb movie reviews, high quality animations, historic choreography . . . it's a sparse list among the many hundreds there, but intelligent content is not completely absent.

Other mobile-only platforms, or content aggregator sites are also emerging. Pixsense.com is a site that users can access from their mobile phones to upload and organise pictures and videos taken from the mobile.

The SMS.ac initiative is a customer charter or, as they put it, Mobile Consumer Bill of Rights. The Bill is little more than a call to make charges absolutely transparent to customers.

In the past, content providers were forced to build customer relationships through the operator (Vodafone, O2, etc) and the operator's brand. Operators set the price for content, billed the customer and passed on a percentage (usually small) to the content provider.

It is a model that disincentivised content producers other than those who had massive content libraries and found mobile to be one more way to exploit it. It meant that creating original content for minority audiences on mobile phones was largely a thankless task.

Now mobile operators are opening up their billing systems and allowing content providers to set the price and collect payments for mobile content via third-party providers. Therein lies the dangers (even less transparent pricing), but also the opportunities.

This new situation means that a producer of content that, say, has artistic merit can promote content on a website, attract a niche audience from around the world and use a third-party payment collection system to make that global audience underwrite content production.

SMS.ac boss, Michael Pusti, believes past practices have undermined public confidence. "The responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of mobile application and content providers to provide clarity and transparency to consumers," Pousti says.

The mobile content industry really needs to be open and honest, traits evident in download services such as iTunes that have created quick-fire revolution in consumer viewing and listening habits. On the road to transparency and a better deal for organisations that own artistic content, a few pointers are already clear.

Media gossip blog Gawker, which reports on - well, gossips on - the lives of the media elite, is now distributed to a paying audience for mobile, the first blog to open up the mobile content market to my knowledge. The Tate Gallery in the UK also has a new mobile site with a direct relationship with customers. Candyspace, a new content aggregator, is offering original images and music from leading artists, movie-makers and composers. Does this signal a new beginning for mobile content? We'll have to wait for the bill to arrive of course, but the omens look good.