News
BREW 08: BREW ecosystem to be extended to D2C services
Stuart O'Brien in San Diego May 28 2008, 10:03pm
BREW operators will be given tools that allow content providers to manage their own storefronts.
Qualcomm is preparing to ramp its BREW Zones intiative, which will enable content providers to manage D2C offerings across partner operators.
Verizon Wireless is already using a small element of BREW Zones, but a full rollout by Qualcomm with other operators is being planned from 1Q09.
Details are sketchy, but essentially content providers will be able to directly target devices embedded with BREW technology. To date, the only route to these devices was through BREW-powered operator portals.
Andrew Gilbert, EVP and president of Qualcomm Internet Services, said: "If our operator partners want to offer off-deck content using the BREW platform they will be able to. Clearly many operators won't want to go down that path, but many will."
The initiative is part of what Qualcomm says is a wider move towards making its BREW client/server system a more 'open' platform for content delivery, reflecting developments in the market such as Google's Android project.
Gilbert continued: "What does open mean? Right now the market is polarised - at one end there's the closed model being used by Apple for iPhone content and at the other there's Google with its open web approach to mobile, which we fully support.
"But that latter approach gives operators very little control over what their networks are being used for. BREW sits somewhere between the two extremes - we can deliver the long tail of web content but in a more controlled manner."
