They’re coming… The big entertainment players are increasingly gearing up to take charge of their mobile destinies. Whereas previously a lot of the big movie studios would simply license out the rights to mobile applications and games to independent game companies (Gameloft and Glu having been particularly active), they seem to increasingly embrace the medium themselves. Sony, Disney, Paramount – they have all recently been self-publishing on the – erm – iPhone. Other mobile platforms? The 98% non-iPhone handsets? Erm, maybe later…

Going a little further, Warner Brothers digital arm plans to release no fewer than 40 iPhone apps in 2009. And besides Warner properties like “Terminator Salvation”, it looks to doing on this platform what it has proven to be quite capable of in others, namely production and distribution. It therefore plans not only to publish Warner-related apps but wants to assert itself as a leading distributor of mobile apps full stop.

It banks on its might and star power claiming that developers would struggle to find Apple’s ear. And there is certainly truth in this as a major studio (with all the marketing muscle that comes with it, may well be of more appeal to Apple when it comes to accentuate the wild growth of its 30,000+ apps on the app store. The return of the old publishing model then?!

But, well, they all do it not on just any mobile but on the iPhone only (I hear you sigh…). So why only the iPhone? 1.x% market share and all? Well, it’s simple and it’s powerful: Warner mentioned that “it doesn’t cost a lot to launch an app”. And that is probably true for the iPhone (at least when you are used to movie budgets). However, it could not be less inaccurate for “classic” mobile: one needs all the carrier distribution agreements, battle handset fragmentation and ends up with a product that is inferior (apps and games on J2ME devices will often fail on the “smallest-common-denominator” rule and lack polish when compared to the iPhone) and much more expensive to produce. Hey, carriers and OEM: another call to simplify and unify your platforms!