• Sea change in UK broadcasters' investment in off-portal mobile content
• Deployment will raise consumer awareness of mobile content as available from traditional media owners
• Awareness will instil a greater comfort in the consumer to access mobile content

Mobile off-portal evangelism continues to gather velocity with the BBC's controller of mobile, Matthew Postgate, quoted as saying: 'We're looking at introducing some quite big stuff (on mobile). We'll spend this month working out our editorial plan,' according to interactive marketing and business weekly, New Media Age.

The proliferation of broadcaster announcements (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and BSKYB) around a rejuvenated commitment to mobile as a content distribution stream is largely attributed to the operators' recent decision (excluding O2 UK and DE) to offer flat-rate data tariffs, in a push to increase blended ARPU (average revenue per user).

From a broadcaster perspective, this means they can offer a wider and richer range of services without the traditional customer 'bill shock' at the end of the month, where the customer could be charged anything up to £7.50 per downloaded megabyte.

Applications like the BBC's mobile iPlayer ( a downloadable application which sits on the deck of a phone) are also scheduled in the BBC roadmap, according to New Media Age.

Outside of public service TV, BSKYB are set to blaze a trail this month with the launch of their FA Premiership mobile services which will offer near-live video goal alerts for the UK Premiership season.

The BSKYB football services will be 'zero rated', which means that a customer discovering the BSKYB mobile 24/7 Football website will be automatically directed to his/her operator portal; ensuring the data charges are incurred by the operator, not by the consumer.