A Tech Digest article showed that media analyst Screen Digest recently completed a study on music downloaded over-the-air (OTA) to mobil phones, as well as speculation on the impact the iPhone might have on the market. Screen Digest speculates that by the year 2012, the OTA market will grow to £1bn ($1,361,330,000), largely due to the consumer markets in Japan and Korea, a possible byproduct of the superiority of their mobile phone networks, and that subscription based services are likely to take 2/3 of the OTA market.

Said Screen Digest digital music specialist Dan Cryan:

“This is a really exciting time for mobile music and industry players are jostling to enter a rapidly growing market with the right products and business models. On the one hand we have Apple’s iPhone, the first generation of which doesn’t lend itself it to over-the-air music downloads."

That said, it is likely that the iPhone will in fact have the capability to download media wirelessly, though iTunes will inevitably be a strong alternative.

According to Tech Digest, the biggest drawback to the iPhone's ability to break new ground in the OTA market lies not with the hardware involved, but with the software... namely iTunes itself. The reason for this they don't give, but theu do say that for many things, it is just too early to tell. There is one thing that everyone seems to agree on, though, and that's that Apple Inc. likes to set trends in the markets it enters, and that the iPhone's role in this remains uncertain.

[Michael Johnston]

I'm not sure about OTA purchases. It's never seemed like an idea that would catch on, to me. But then again, there have never been easy phones out there. The iPhone could make this market explode due, not only to it's ease of use, but also because of the iTMS