Sports and Big Brother mobile alerts to top $4.5bn

News, sports and entertainment clips and alerts for mobile phones - dubbed "infotainment" - are set to boom in the next few years as the US and Asia start to get a taste for mobile multimedia.

Around 21 per cent of the world's mobile users - some 380 million people - will use mobile infotainment this year and the majority will be European, according to analysts Juniper Research.

But Juniper predicts the phenomenon will soon take off in the US and Asia, with sports text alerts and video clips driving the growth. The US market for mobile sports entertainment is expected to reach $1bn by the 2009.

While the overall infotainment market is still relatively small globally, it is predicted to hit $4.5bn in revenue by 2009.

Infotainment revenues will also be matched in cash terms by person-to-person multimedia messaging. A recent report from Forrester Research found that by 2010, MMS will bring operators €5bn.