O2, 3 UK combine mobile video services
04 February 2008
O2, 3 UK combine mobile video services
UK operators 3 and O2 announced a partnership on Monday that will see the cellcos combine their respective mobile video services into a single community.
The carriers will merge their existing user generated content services, 3's SeeMeTV and O2's LookAtMe!, and make them accessible to any UK mobile user, regardless of network.
Both services are based on the same underlying platform developed by mobile application developer Yospace. The new service will be called EyeVibe.
Members of the EyeVibe community will be able to access the full library of user generated video captured on mobile handsets as well as engage in messaging, voting and comment.
Since the launch of the individual SeeMeTV and LookAtMe! platforms, which actually pay submitters every time their content is downloaded, the operators claim that users have paid for more than 32 million video downloads earning a combined total of over £800,000 for users who have submitted more than 60,000 clips.
The combined services currently generate 28 million mobile page impressions per month, suggesting that their might actually be some legs on this mobile video market. And probably some breasts as well, given that much of the content available is softcore porn. Although telecoms.com has heard that as much as 80 per cent of the submitted user generated material gets filtered out for being too risque.
Of course, we hear that 3 and O2's content fluffers don't delete any of the hard stuff, just put it away for a rainy day, when maybe there's more of an acceptable market for that sort of thing.
In the forthcoming February issue of Mobile Communications International (MCI), there is a feature on customer ownership, which addresses the problems the carriers face.
After buying licences, building networks and subsidising high end handsets for their subscriber base, the fear now is that by taking down the garden walls the internet big boys will move in and soak up all the gravy.
Tony Cripps, a senior analyst at Ovum, said "It's difficult because one of the inevitabilities for a long time has been that companies like Yahoo and Google were going to try and make their impact felt in the mobile market, because, frankly, I don't think they see it as a mobile market, it's an extension of what they already do."
So in a way, 2 and O2's partnership is how the operators are tackling the problem of giving the customers access to the content they want, whilst still retaining some control.
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