MocoNews broke the story yesterday that the CEO of Fox Mobile/Jamba, Lucy Hood, has resigned. That’s not particularly interesting news, but something in the writeup there, and at RCR, caught my eye.

An addition to the MocoNews post paraphrases an anonymous source as saying the JV’s “business/opportunity is more Europe (and Asia) for now than in the U.S.”, while RCR says “Critics have suggested Fox has been slow to capitalize on the tie-up, failing to quickly integrate Jamba’s distribution channels with valuable content from franchises such as ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy.’”

The line in the MocoNews piece about the bigger opportunity for the business being in Europe initially struck me as little more than a justification for a poor performance in the US — after all, it’s a big market with plenty of people spending money on ringtones and wallpapers and the like. But then I got to wondering: has the market here moved past this sort of content?

I don’t get the impression that ringtones and wallpapers are quite the rage here they were a couple of years ago, as the demand tails off, people got tired of getting ripped off, and as Russell’s pointed out, people are turning to free sources. Still, I don’t think this is a US-only phenomenon, unless the European and Asian “opportunity” is in emerging markets.

The line from the RCR piece is a little more telling about the business, though. The problem isn’t that the JV wasn’t quick enough in bringing Simpsons content to market; the problem is that it’s still trying to flog the same old stuff to consumers, just with different TV characters and brands appearing in them. High-priced ringtones? Snore. Wallpapers? Geez.

The word innovation gets tossed around a lot, but when was the last time these businesses came up with anything new to sell? When they switched to truetones from polyphonics? The only real innovation was the change to subscription plans from single purchases — and we know how that turned out. These companies act as if the holy grail is securing licenses to high-profile brands and shows, but how about coming up with something new and interesting to try and flog?