Movidity Takes Unique Approach to Mobile Video Sharing
To the casual surfer, movy.tv will appear to be very much like YouTube. "At the movy.tv site you'll have a small preview. There will be user ratings. You upload a video and tag it. You'll be able to search on tags. And the video will run in the Flash player under your browser. So it will look and smell like YouTube or one of the other services," says Lollo. "The real difference is that that is secondary to us. The primary piece is the ability to receive those on your cell phone and do on your cell phone the sort of things you’re used to doing on your PC."
Movy.tv will feature user-generated content, but that will be only "about half of the equation," says Lollo. "We are also inviting broadcasters and giving them a global mobile audience. So we’re kind of mixing up a couple of different business models. It will be interesting to see how people will leverage it and turn it their own use."
Mixed Business Model
Lollo says that Movidity is looking at a couple of traditional monetization schemes for its service. "But in the end we’re not sure how this is all going to pan out," he admits. "We'll be relying on advertising revenue, subscription revenue and perhaps a level of transaction revenue, depending upon how we build or integrate marketing campaigns around the media that’s put down to us. So we'll start off with traditional revenue streams, and it’s blue sky after that."
Advertising will almost certainly have to play a part in Movidity's business model. Lollo believes mobile device users won't accept TV-style advertising, which he says is "in our faces 24/7" and thus too invasive. He says mobile advertising will need to be "tailored to this medium, and part of that is that it has to fit the small screen size. Advertising that runs on mobile devices has to be less intrusive. We prefer that our content providers customize their advertising media so that it’s 5 or 10 seconds long. We call them video adlets, and they are formatted for the small screen. And we’ll have a function called ad injection. So a user will upload their video content and then at random and according to the tags that have been put on that content, we’ll inject advertising on the front end of their video. For instance, when you select a clip, a 5-second Coke commercial may show up on your handset and run before you can watch your chosen clip. So that's how we'll integrate advertising into the model."
For better or worse, the Movidity business model, as it stands today, puts the financial burden on the content provider. Surfers and cell phone users can access the videos for free, but content providers have to pay a subscription to fee to make their content available to those endusers. Lollo explains how a content provider gets started with movy.tv. "First they subscribe with us and sign up to movy.tv. If they want to provide live streaming through the service, first they have to provide a suitable feed, and we have to be able to connect that to our backend," says Lollo. "Once connected into our backend system, we can essentially give them a sort of a channel, so to speak, on movy.tv, and off they go. Now in order to support the backend costs to run the infrastructure, we’re going to have a subscription fee that’s attached to that. Basically, it will be a flat rate to get into the service, then a micro-transaction rate that is additive over a period of time depending on how many people have decided to watch that particular channel."
Courting Broadcasters and Corporate Users
Rather than relying on America's Funniest Videos-style user generated content from amateurs, Movidity hopes to attract content from professional broadcasters and corporations. "There are a lot of small time broadcasters and sort of pseudo broadcasters in the world," says Lollo. "You don’t have to be CNN or ABC or some mainline media company to be a broadcaster. We’ve been practically swamped by a whole bunch of small speciality channels since our announcement. These are content providers who have vertically-oriented content or content targeted to a specific culture or language. These are people who want to push their content out to a mobile audience without having to go through a lot of special back-flips to deal with multiple carriers and so forth."
Another potential type of content provider/subscriber is businesses. "We've also been talking to a lot of corporate users who have a lot of media or live streaming media that they want to put through," says Lollo. "Corporate enterprises like IBM or GM, for instance, could use this service to disseminate multimedia-based information within their organization; they could send it out to a select grouping of people. And we also have clients right now who are looking to use the service to disseminate video based training out to specific groups of people in the field.