A large percentage of multimedia content on mobile phone is either user generated or is stored on handsets, according to Pioneer Consulting’s “Multimedia Mobile Content Distribution.”

Increasingly, this content is shared with friends, family and contacts on social networks. Handsets having Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and WiMAX capabilities let end users use alternative networks to share content, effectively bypassing the operator’s mobile network and the content value chain.

Pioneer Consulting estimates that as a result of users sharing content and bypassing the existing value chain, $16.4 billion worth of revenue opportunity will be at risk by 2012. This is estimated to be more than a quarter of the total revenue opportunity for that year.

However, the study says that all is not lost yet and operators can play a key role in preventing this disruption from happening. To begin, mobile operators need to re-evaluate the applicability of the traditional client-server content delivery architecture in an environment where a large portion of the content originates from the handset. In addition, operators need to realize that there will be a bandwidth bottleneck between the base station and the handset due to an oversubscribed air interface, especially in the case of bandwidth heavy multimedia content.

“Mobile operators need to embrace peer-to-peer (P2P) methodologies within their own networks and focus on the advantages of using both assisted P2P and augmented P2P to mitigate the disruption,” said Robert Hsieh, author of the report.

“P2P is generally treated with contempt by operators and has now become the ‘P’ word that should never be uttered,” said Aditya Kaul, senior analyst of Emerging Wireless at Pioneer. “It is more of an attitude problem rather than an engineering one, and unless operators wake up to the reality of the situation, we cannot even begin to solve the problem.”