The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) has released its member-only Smart Enablers Guide, the result of an industry-wide collaboration into the role of smart enablers in the mobile industry. The Guide shows how enablers provide clear benefits, not only for the industry, but also for the consumer, by facilitating a better user experience.
The Guide is designed to help all parties in the mobile media ecosystem understand why the smart enabler role is important, and the key challenges, benefits and opportunities available to the industry, as well as potential revenue benefits, new business models and commercial frameworks.
“The concept of enabling services is not new and already exists in the shape of wholesale airtime resale to MVNOs, bulk SMS billing, such as premium SMS and third-party billing,” says MEF chairman, Andrew Bud. “These enablers are very useful and are now being joined by a richer suite of enablers with further capabilities. In fact, 50 per cent of respondents to our survey expect the use of smart enablers to increase their revenues by up to 25 per cent. Yet there remains a lack of understanding about how to implement a coherent enabler strategy to grow these revenues. The MEF Guide will benefit the entire mobile media ecosystem and allow content owners and service providers to understand the opportunity enabling services provide for their businesses.”
The highest ranked smart enabler services from the MEF survey, relate to the essentials of good service delivery, in the form of ensuring a good user experience (customer insights, device/network capabilities and settings) along with enablers that ensure smooth payment for a content item (billing support, credit checks). There are many other smart enablers to draw on and the Guide contains a full ranking order of 20 enablers/service functionality items, that respondents rated according to areas which were of greatest importance to their business. 
Of the members surveyed, approximately half confirmed that their preferred smart enabler service partner remains the mobile network operator. However, says MEF, there are a huge range of third parties that can play a role in the provision of smart enabler services, such as content originators, aggregators, application developers, internet players and the advertising community. 50 per cent of respondents indicated a desire to work with these players, including network aggregators (40 per cent), handset manufacturers (32 per cent), internet players (25 per cent) and device operating platform vendors (22 per cent).
The MEF Smart Enablers Guide has been authored by Ovum with the support of MEF member companies BBC, Dolby, Gracenote, IMImobile, mBlox, OpenMarket (formerly MX Telecom), Ovum, Telefonica O2 and Vodafone. The initiative was project managed by Accenture.
