Amp'd mobile ramping up cell phone sales with videos.

Feisty Amp'd Mobile Inc. is pedaling as fast as it can to capture the 18- to 24-year-old market it believes will drive the burgeoning mobile phone video network sector.

With a subscriber surge, an advertising blitz, several notable content deals and the first phone character to cross over into TV, Amp'd Mobile has built up a head of steam in the past few months.

But in an emerging and fluid market jammed with goliath and aggressive rivals, Amp'd Mobile of Westwood will have to avoid crashing like the bicycling boy on the daredevil ramp in its TV commercials.

"Look at the revenue," trumpeted Amp'd Mobile's Chief Executive Peter Adderton. "If we stayed static today, we would do over $100 million in revenue this year, but if we grow to 300,000 or 400,000 subscribers, we'll do well over several hundred million in revenue."

Part of the concern among industry watchers is that they can't look at the revenue, or much else, for that matter. As a private company, Amp'd keeps most of its figures--with the exception of glossy subscriber numbers--under wraps.

"It's still too early to tell," said Rafat Ali, who edits the Moconews.net blog that follows mobile phone content companies. "The biggest MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) is Virgin Mobile, which just announced 4 million subscribers and that took them a long time. One hundred thousand is just a drop in the bucket."

The keys for the company are landing subscribers, maximizing the return on them and hanging onto them over the long haul. So far, the company appears successful on the first two.

When they launched late in 2005, Amp'd Mobile executives set a goal of 100,000 subscribers by the end of last year, which they met easily. They also point to the company's average monthly revenue per subscriber, which is more than $100. That's more than double the average from any other mobile phone content company. The price for Amp'd phone service and content access is based on minutes used monthly. A thousand minutes costs $50 per month, for example, unlimited usage is $150 per month.

Original content from Amp'd was popular, accounting for 39 percent of all mobile video downloads in the fourth quarter, in part because of popular shows like "Lil Bush: Resident of the United States," "Sucks Less With Kevin Smith" and live coverage of supercross racing and Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts bouts.

The company's "Lil Bush," from writer and producer Donick Cary, will become the first original show to make the transition from mobile broadcast to TV later this year on Comedy Central.

Amp'd has content deals with all of the broadcast networks, cable's ESPN, Fox Sports and E!, as well as Universal Music Group and a handful of production companies including Bunim/Murray and Mark Burnett. They recently cut a deal to create an original series specifically for mobile phones with MTV and another content deal with the National Basketball Association, too.

While the subscription numbers at Amp'd are dwarfed by the major mobile services offered by Virgin Mobile USA Inc., Sprint Nextel, Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless, Adderton believes that at this point, that can be an advantage for Amp'd with its youth niche strategy.

"The big carriers can't be specific," he said. "We've got a pretty good understanding of what it's going to take to get the 18- to 24-year-olds."

In terms of content delivery, Amp'd is facing competition from smaller content providers such as Sky Dayton's Westwood-based Helio LLC, Sherman Oaks-based GoTV Inc. and Emeryville-based MobiTV.

Adderton doesn't sound worried.

"GoTV and MobiTV are aggregators of other people's content," he said. "You have to be an Amp'd customer to get the Amp'd Live service."

Helio offers targeted content specifically to the same youth market that Amp'd targets, but is a little pricier.

"Amp'd is cheaper," said Ali. "The difference is coming down though, because Helio lowered all of its prices. One is saying 'we're high end' and the other is saying 'we're mass distributed, but we're edgy.'"

Adderton, 39, has developed something of a reputation for edginess--and success--himself. He's an exuberant Australian and helicopters in regularly from his Irvine home to the firm's Westwood offices, where 320 workers are employed.

Prior to landing at Amp'd, he founded Australia's Boost Mobile phone company in 2000 and built it up into a brand with 1.5 million users and annual revenues of more than $500 million.

"He had success with Boost," said Ali, "but he's now really trying to replicate that at Amp'd, which is more, mainstream than Boost, which focused on an urban audience."

International markets will be on the front burner at Amp'd this year.

The company is planning to open an office and a major launch in Japan in March, in partnership with Tokyo-based KDDI Corp., which claims more than 20 million Japanese cell phone-users.

"Amp'd Live will be available to all of KDDI customers," Adderton said. "It's a media portal. You'll be able to go onto the KDDI file and onto the Amp'd Mobile file."

The company also plans to launch in Canada later this year.