The door to India (-n mobile music)
So the new music service from Nokia has a name, Ovi, which means ‘door’ in Finnish. More specifically the music is part of the Ovi service which also includes some gaming and map options. The service operates through both the web and mobile. Nokia plans to roll it out in major European countries over the next few months.
What is really exciting however is that Nokia is paying attention to the Asia market. On Wednesday of this week, a senior Nokia VP in Singapore announced that they will be rolling out Ovi in India in the first half of 2008. For the benefit of the North Americans reading this post, yes India is part of Asia.
In fact, Nokia has been taking India very seriously for some time. They recently announced that India has become their second biggest market after China and as of January this year, they had a 79% market share of handsets. This is a country with 185 million mobile subscribers growing at a rate of approximately 6,000 new subscriptions per month. You do the maths. Nokia is also manufacturing in India. It has produced 60 million handsets since opening a factory 18 months ago, half of which have been sold domestically.
So it seems that mobile music and other forms of mobile content are high on Nokia’s priority list. It also seems that Ovi is going to take care of the markets that iTunes has to date simply ignored. Get ready for ‘Bollywood music on the mobile’ - take that Mr. Jobs!