So much hinges on advertising in India, where piracy of content is rampant: ET reports that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) may launch advertising supported content services in India. There will be local language content, particularly in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali; Nokia intends to provide old songs, video clips and mobile games ad-supported and free of cost, while new/premium content will need to be paid for.

Nokia India MD D. Shivakumar uses that worn out logic of 80 million TV sets vs 225 million handsets - how many are GPRS/Multimedia enabled and how many will know how to activate these services? As per (bold) company projections, this initiative might contribute 10 percent of revenues over the next 2-3 years. Given how dominant Nokia is in India, this would be a substantial amount. The services are expected to be launched in Q1 2008. All this while, I find it tedious to navigate Nokia Catalogs…they may supply the content, but content discovery issues will need to be addressed.