Spending even more money on-line

Over the long holiday break, and with four young children, I found myself becoming a heavy-weight consumer of telecoms and on-line services.  First mobile phones for children, on-line purchases of music for MP3 players & on-line gaming subscriptions.  If my spending trends are typical of the rest of the developed world, I reckon 50% of my Christmas spending was carried out on-line, with a non-trivial amount of my budget being spent with telecoms and content companies.  Of course this is what this new industry is betting on.  Not just the migration of purchasing from the high-street to purchasing on-line, but the diversion of other types of spend towards the coffers of the communications, internet and entertainment companies.  

But I suspect that we are hitting a glass ceiling on the amount of spend that can be diverted to the communications companies with the current technology approaches.  The promise of a tightly integrated communications, internet & entertainment industry is still some ways off, and requires the emergence of standard service delivery platforms that allow the dizzying array of potential content providers to get their content to the mass market via the existing communications delivery and charging infrastructure.

But of course once that happens I will probably just end up spending even more money over the holiday season - so perhaps I had better rethink my industry vision!