Wireless carriers like Sprint and Verizon Wireless continue to push video services over mobile phones to customers, regardless of whether customers want it or not. I spotted a recent Verizon Wireless ad touting a $99 VCast-enabled cell phone.

Everyone I've chatted with (including two hip Plantronics PR representatives) has dismissed the usefulness of mobile video - the general response I get is, "Why would I want to pay $x for that?"

My anecdotal evidence now has some statistical backup. A recent In-Stat mobile phone subscriber survey shows that one in eight respondents are interested in purchasing mobile video services from their wireless carrier. I guess 12.5% is actually quite good, but it's unclear how many people were surveyed by In-Stat. According to the same survey, two-thirds of mobile phone subscribers "are not yet ready for video services on their handsets," a number that hasn't changed from the previous year's survey, the research firm says.

Still the company predicts that the number of subscribers buying mobile video content in the U.S. will grow from 1.1 million this year to more than 30 million by 2010. The firm suggest that long-term loyal customers are the least interested in buying mobile video, meaning it will be the hardest sell to those customers who are the most valuable to the carriers.

Maybe pornography will help drive mobile video services, but the issue of pornography on mobile devices is thorny to carriers. A report by Informa Telecom says the market for erotic content on mobile devices can be worth $2.3 billion by 2010, but this is "highly dependent on mobile phone carriers and content providers working with regulators" to provide age verification procedures.

The Informa report says that Vodafone and other operators in the U.K. have taken a proactive approach to the issue, by making sure that subscribers who want the content are age verified properly. The report says that the introduction of age verification systems in the U.K. has actually resulted in an increase in traffic for adult content - possibly because consumers are more likely to use services that they are confident in.

In the U.S., mobile carriers are currently taking a "walled garden" approach to all mobile content, which means that at the moment there's not much erotic content traveling over mobile phones here in the states. However, Informa says that consumer pressure and succeeding direct-to-consumer channel strategies will mean that the walled garden approach won't be around long term. "Without controls, operators will find themselves being used to distribute adult content whether they like it or not," the report says.