What does the age of convenience have in store?

With the Euro 2012 football championships in full swing, it is hardly surprising that sport – particularly the beautiful game – is dominating the telemedia news this week.

O2 Media has found that 79% of sports fans use mobile as their first port of call for keeping up to date with scores, fixtures and team news around the championships and, perhaps unsurprisingly, its mostly men who do it.

What is perhaps surprising is that 73% of these football mad men will be also using their devices to text and call friends while the games are on to talk tactics and share their highs and lows, as well as wading in with their armchair manager input on Twitter and Facebook.

While much attention is focused on how mobile can be used to create in-game betting opportunities and high level apps abound to do everything from watch different camera angles to ordering a pizza while playing a football game, good old texting appears to still be one of the key areas of engagement for fans with each other.

As has been said many times in Telemedia-news, despite all the tech, text is still king. And this is an opportunity that is woefully overlooked by many in the wider mobile industry.

This news is compounded by a study by telco billing company MACH, which has found that more than a third of smartphone users are opting to pay for apps and services within apps – sporting or otherwise – using direct operator billing.

The reason why, despite everything else available that fans are texting and app users are using direct operator billing? Simple: convenience.

And this is something that needs to be capitalized on. The more convenient it is to do something the more likely people will do it. Which means more revenues – even if payouts are higher.

This convenience factor – as well as price issues – is borne out by Orca’s YouGov-conducted poll of consumers who suggest that 08 numbers as a means to contact are damaging brands as the cost of calling them from mobiles in particular, but also landlines, is at best opaque. Orca, naturally, is championing voice short codes as a way around this – much as the wider industry is trying to push Payforit4 for on-bill payments – but there is something in what is being proposed. Even the staid old BBC has used voice short codes to enable mobile voting on its flagship Saturday night talent show The Voice. A ringing endorsement indeed. If that wasn’t enough, Big Brother over on Channel 5 is also now offering voice short code voting too, through Spoke (formerly Telecom Express).

Again, voice short codes play into the need for convenience. Not just that they are short and easy, but the fact that you know what they are going to cost you is itself a convenience.

What all this means is that, after a decade of development of new billing tools, new ways of creating interactivity and in trying to create ways to do in-app billing, the old ways are in fact being looked at by consumers as being the easiest.

So why isn’t more being done to make these things part of the mainstream fabric of the mobile ecosystem? You never hear Apple talk about voice short codes or Payforit4. You never see banks or app developers talking up these tools for purchasing things. Even with retailers bemoaning the fact that one of the biggest limiting factors to getting mobile retail working in store is a lack of a general and easy to use payment mechanism, operators are very slow to react.

But as the MACH, Orca and O2 Media surveys show, consumers are starting to vote with their fingers and seek out the easiest and best ways to do things and woe-be-tied those that don’t start to embrace this groundswell.