Unless you’ve been living under a pretty big rock for the last three months you’ll know that the eyes of the world will be turning towards Britain this Friday when Prince William will marry Catherine Middleton. The wedding, which will take place at Westminster Abbey, will be a fabulously expensive affair, but is also expected to generate up to £1bn from extra tourist revenues and sales of memorabilia. Even conservative estimates put the likely television/online audience of the wedding above 1 billion people around the planet and hundreds of thousands more are expected to line the route between Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.
According to a survey conducted by Antenna earlier this year, 1 in 4 British and 1 in 5 US consumers are using the mobile internet on a daily basis. With the mobile internet increasingly taking on a role more like that of the internet internet, it is a fair bet that the mobile internet will play a big part in the way the public views Friday’s pomp and circumstance. In all likelihood, the Royal Wedding will be the biggest mobile internet ‘event’ of all time, with users streaming video of the ceremony, sharing pictures, using social media like Twitter and Facebook to commentate on the event in tandem with their friends, and of course, texting and making phone calls about it.
If you need any further proof about the public’s willingness to ‘mobilize’ the Royal Wedding, check out the number of third-party mobile applications that have been built to celebrate on the nuptials; at present there are 68 such applications for the iPhone alone and another 30 for the Android platform! Needless to say these apps offer wildly different experiences – from keeping up with the news via BBC America’s Royal Insider to watching a cartoon of the story of the couple’s relationship to enjoying the sight of a rather irreverent pair of ‘Wills & Kate bouncing heads’.
But bouncing heads aside, will the mobile operators/networks be able to cope with the predicted enormous surge in mobile internet traffic associated with the wedding? Worryingly, the answer may be no. One such indicator that mobile networks are already being stretched to the max came from AT&T’s recent filing justifying its bid to buy T-Mobile:
A smartphone generates 24 times the mobile data traffic of a conventional wireless phone, and the explosively popular iPad and similar tablet devices can generate traffic comparable to or even greater than a smartphone. AT&T’s mobile data volumes surged by a staggering 8,000% from 2007 to 2010, and as a result, AT&T faces network capacity constraints more severe than those of any other wireless provider. [via Matt Rosoff, Financial Post]
It will be interesting to see if tomorrow’s event (and let’s not forget the second-to-last launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour also taking place!) marks the time when people turn first to their mobiles for news and updates, instead of relying on traditional TV and internet. But if mobile networks are already as stretched as this quote suggests, there is a chance that members of the public hoping to follow proceedings via their phones are going to have frustrating experiences, especially if they’re trying to access websites not optimized for mobile phones. In this situation, it is the outlets who have thought ahead and released their own Royal Wedding ‘coverage app’ who will be the most popular with mobile users on the big day.
Here at Antenna we’d like to wish the Royal Couple all the best!
Tags: 2011 Trends, Apps, Mark Watson, Mobile Apps, Mobile Internet, Mobile Web
