Tom Wheeler, a managing director at Core Capital Partners, has taken News Corp chief operating officer Peter Chernin’s analogy of the current mobile industry as being like that of the cable TV business in the 70’s and ran with it. He argues that it’s not just an analogy, but the business model for mobile content and cable TV channels are the same, and are based on the earlier business model of magazine publishing. “Targeted content with themes that already are proven in the print world simply being transported to another consumption vehicle,” he writes in TMCnet.

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It’s a good point, and the strongest argument yet against the “carrier deck” approach to selling mobile content, which has acted more like broadcast television in trying to deliver common content to the broadest possible market. The top of the deck tends to sell the most and it’s a relatively small number of people that go searching down through the screens and menus. There have been some attempts to customize this based on user demographic and history, but even that fails in some regards because people look for different types of content at different times and for different reasons. The business model is easily accessible “channels” of targeted themes, the main issue is which technologies and formats work to make that content easily accessible…that’s the part the industry is trying to work out.