Its not quite Nokia-sized, but Sony Ericsson has revealed a major drive into content services.
The handset company is to launch PlayNow Arena, an evolution of the PlayNow service it first introduced in February 2004. This was a limited content store available directly from the phone, which is now available in 32 countries around the world. Annual downloads through both PlayNow and Fun & Downloads have reached more than 200 million.PlayNow will integrate the basic content store with discovery tools like TrackID, which currently records more than 125,000 hits a day. So consumers will be able to move from TrackID to the PlayNow arena with one click. The arena will feature TrackID Charts too. The store will be expanded to offer hundreds of games, themes and wallpapers, millions of music tracks and thousands of mastertones. There will also be a catalogue of free content
Roll-out of the enhanced PlayNow service will start in Q2 2008. It will be compatible with a wide range of Sony Ericsson phones and support MP3 and Windows Media DRM-enabled devices, regardless of manufacturer
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