World Telemedia Amsterdam triumphant

Those of you who weren’t in Amsterdam between 12 and 14 October at WORLD TELEMEDIA missed a great event. The old vibe that makes an overseas telemedia event go with a swing and a bang was back in spades. Great venue, great exhibition and great conference – with some excellent speakers, thanks everyone – and, despite the mock-groaning, everyone was secretly glad to be back in Amsterdam. Even the Europub.

The show was particularly interesting as it offered the chance for the industry to come together not just to network and do deals, bit to also start making in roads into some of the key issues that are impacting on it.

Most notable was the upshot of the fraud seminar session on Wednesday 12 October, which not only saw a number of key industry players discuss the issues of fraud – and indeed of arbitrage, more of which anon – but also several of the leading companies in the industry decided at the World Telemedia meeting t form a group to start working to lobby the major networks around the world to start to do something about traffic hijacking.

Hijacking has long been a low-level problem for the industry, but in the past three years it has grown exponentially and is now taking up to 50% of revenues away from some services, according to estimates by the panellists.  The ad hoc grouping, which had its inaugural meeting at the show, is set to detail its modus operandi in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere at the event, we saw the usual round of lively parties and drinks receptions – though is it me or is everyone better behaved these days? – and a conference that brought in a host of telemedia favourites and some interesting newbies to debate everything from interactive services, to billing and m-payments, to marketing to chat and dating and telemedia essentials.

One of the most surprising upshots of  opening keynote from SKOPOS was that, while most male orientated mobile services are hung around sport, a study of male mobile users found that only 37% of them liked sport. SKOPOS’ research of consumers also found that the web and mobile web use was normalising risqué behaviour among adult users – which has to be good news for the telemedia sector.

The adult worlds of chat and dating – along with horoscope and psychic – are also blooming, our panel found, with users growing despite the recession. Hard times usually bring out the small spends, so traditionally telemedia services do well and this seems to be being borne out. According to AIME’s David Ashman’s presentation flirt, chat and dating has grown by 35% year on year to £37.4million in the UK in 2010. Tarot, psychic and astrology is up 23.1% to £21.4million in the same period.

According to Ashman, virtual gifts is the star player right now in premium rate, growing an eyewatering 438% to £8.1million in 2010 – with even more expected from 2011.

So from a purely telemedia point of view, there is much to be cheery about.

FOR FULL REPORT FROM WORLD TELEMEDIA SEE TELEMEDIA-MONTH OCTOBER ISSUE OUT ON 31 OCTOBER