Ghosty at the World Telemedia awards?

October 24, 2007 | Comments

So, the participation TV event we ran for Discovery in the US back in June is up for a few awards: Best Use of Interactive Television and Best Use of Mobile at the BIMAs, and the Eureka awards at World Telemedia. The latter is a particularly good fit, because it's for bizarre projects that actually have legs: precisely how we've always seen Ghosty. And behind the supernatural ghost-hunting front-end we think it demonstrates a few principles that really hold water:

  • Broadcasters and programme makers want to interact with audiences, but find that SMS is limited in expressiveness, sluggish in response and not exactly trusted by consumers or regulators nowadays;
  • Programme audiences enjoy getting involved with TV formats - just look at the rise of voting or of user-generated content over the last few years;
  • Traditional red-button interactive TV has failed to deliver mass interactivity, is based on staid, fragmented and closed platforms, and mobile provides a much better hope for getting the public engaged with TV than iTV does;
So here's the bit where I blatantly start shilling: the Eureka awards are accepting public votes by text or on the web site. It looks like we're up against strong competition (hi Alfie!), but I can't see anyone coming close to us on the "wild and wacky" front. If you'd like to strike a blow for all that is ludicrous, please do head over there and vote for the mobile ghost detector :)

links for 2007-10-23

October 23, 2007 | Comments

links for 2007-10-22

October 22, 2007 | Comments

links for 2007-10-21

October 21, 2007 | Comments

iPhone, I-mode, content providers and revenue share

October 21, 2007 | Comments

I read these comments from Mark Curtis t'other day: "Make no mistake; the operators will be seeking to get the data element of the Apple tax back. And guess who from? Yes, the small army of content and service providers trying extremely hard to create a mobile data industry." Now, Marks' company Flirtomatic are an old client of ours... so maybe I should just talk to him rather than blogging aimlessly about this, but hey it's Sunday and I think he'd rather spend the weekend with his family than hearing me drone at him. I'm wondering whether this is actually all that much of a departure for O2; when they introduced I-Mode they threatened to shake up the ol' UK content ecosystem with a 86/14 revenue share in favour of content providers, which makes it look as though in principle they're comfortable taking a small cut of data revenues: call it 15%. So between 10 and 40% of revenues go to Apple, say it's near the upper end of that and it's 35%; O2 are happy taking 15% for themselves as per I-mode, this still leaves the now-traditional 50% of revenues going to content providers - so no change for them. And O2 get to avoid a bit of risk by not subsidising iPhones - if customers buying them don't use data services, O2 aren't out of pocket. I'm not saying this 50% is necessarily reasonable, just that it's not much of a change from the status quo.