WHILE YOUTUBE HAS become the brand name in shared Internet video, hundreds of companies – thanks to its US$1.7 billion sale price to Google – are attempting to get a slice of the pie.
Toronto’s Movidity Inc. thinks it has its own niche among the growing number of players: Wireless. The company’s multimedia site and application, movy.tv, will launch next week and it’s been built specifically for the wireless world where users will be able to not only see and share video but also have full DVR functionality with video clips on their cell phones.
Of course, existing video sites will play generally on expensive smart phones and other pricey handhelds, but movy.tv will play on almost any handset with a screen, says company founder Mauro Lollo, thanks to unique technology.
While it will be relying in user-generated content for fuel and an ad model business plan, the company is hopeful of signing on interested broadcasters (short film channel Movieola is on board) and movy.tv has some other interesting planks in its business plan, too.
Lollo (pictured below) recently talked with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien about the company’s plans. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Let’s just start from the start. I don’t know how many readers would be familiar with Movidity or movy.tv, so let’s just start with an easy one: What is it?
Mauro Lollo: Movidity has been around for about a year and a half now and is the outc
ome of a fair amount of research and development that was done in terms data transmission and multimedia playback. Three years of R&D work has gone into this concept. The intellectual property, the software, is meant for transmission of multimedia over low-capacity networks down to low-capacity devices. Low-capacity essentially means how the Internet works, and mobile devices, in that perspective.
GOB: Any kind of multimedia?
ML: Pretty much any kind of multimedia. Any video or audio. It could be Flash and things of that nature but it’s particularly suited for things like archived and live video.
It also has interactive capabilities that are built right into the system, so a user can have DVR functionality in the video stream. They can rewind 24 hours on a live TV channel, pause, rewind and fast-forward within a segment that’s already playing on their handset. They can have interactive audience participation, click-through advertising and that sort of thing imbedded in live video streams.
GOB: When you say live video streams, are you talking about live broadcast TV?
ML: Yes, it could be, absolutely. It could be live broadcast TV, AM/FM radio, terrestrial broadcast, satellite radio or any medium that is happening in either real time or that is archived: Movies and things of that nature. It can also includes things like video security cameras… and actually have remote control over those cameras. It’s a very interesting capability.
GOB: If you’re going to control live TV, then where is the storage aspect if you’re pausing and rewinding?
ML: It’s built on two pieces. There’s a storage aspect that sits on the users’ handheld devices, so the mobile device, be it the cell phone or the PDA, for up to about 90 plus seconds or so within that bracket. Then backend storage happens, in the case of movy.tv, on our servers.
So we essentially archive – at this point, we’re looking at about 24 hours worth of live video content (per channel), and the audio obviously. But that can be sort of limitless. It’s only based on the amount of storage that we require. It’s still quite efficient. The 24 hours essentially means if I miss the Flintstones last night at 6 on whatever cartoon channel, then I could rewind back to 6 and pick it up from there and start watching the cartoon channel, for instance, from that point.
So the technology offers a number of things… and the ability to run it on a wide variety of mobile devices, not just the higher-end devices that cost $400 to $800 that are available from mobile carriers. So we have a better opportunity for a larger potential audience, or to gain a larger subscriber base because of that.
GOB: So it’ll work on the cheaper phones as long as its got a screen?
ML: Yeah, pretty much. Typically, the handset has to have a couple of things. It has to be able to run a small Java application, which about 80% of handsets can do that today. So we have some minimal requirements from the handset to be able to do that to run our video player essentially, which is downloaded over the Internet.
So movy.tv essentially is the embodiment of a set of services that is based upon this technology platform that we’ve created. For about a year now we’ve been looking at the concept and considering how the business model will pan out. But with all the activity that’s going on in the space today from people like YouTube, MySpace and some other of those popular social networking sites on the Internet… we felt that we had to basically make our announcement in November and tell the world that we’re actually working on this and we’re going to be bringing it out live in January.
GOB: This is a direct to consumer play or are you approaching carriers, too?
ML: Direct to consumer. It’s sort of a true, unrestricted, mobile video platform that allows consumers to upload and share media. Consumers in this case can be anybody from you and me that are sitting in our basement to corporate customers who need to disseminate training material, or to broadcasters of any type.
The service in itself is not restricted to any particular geography or carrier. As long as you can download the application onto your phone and install it, it can access the movy.tv site, basically through the Internet over your phone. Then you have media.
GOB: Now, what about copyright questions and things like that when it comes to others’ owned material?
ML: Good point. In the same case as YouTube today, people are posting all kinds of media there. Probably a good one-third of it is violating copyright and such. So the onus is on two pieces; one on the consumer not to do that, an number two if we’re alerted of any copyright violations then we will remove that from the site.
So today, we’re actually working a number of content providers who have directed content, fairly interesting stuff, either in short snippets or two-hour long movies, who are looking to actually use movy.tv as jump-off point, a direct-to-consumer service. So in reality, we’re kind of mixing up a few business models. One being YouTube, but this would be sort of YouTube for mobile, right. Then two, being something like MobiTV.
And three, another concept is to allow private corporate customers to disseminate information out to a mobile workforce. Then, four, if you’re familiar with podcasting and such, then people who are doing live streaming or live podcasting over the wireless infrastructure today, that’s going to be a capability of movy.tv. It’s all based on our technology. That pretty much allows whatever media to be sent across a wireless or a low-bandwidth network to a low-capability device.
GOB: Now, when you’re talking about business customers looking to disseminate training material or whatever, is that something that can be sent securely that only the viewers who are meant for it are allowed to see?
ML: Yes. In essence you’ll be able to get on to movy.tv and create a private group. So you can either post your material and have it accessed by the entire world, so the entire world essentially on their cell phones can search on it and replay it, or you can create private groups for your own purposes, which you invite people to and/or have people subscribe to. Then those private groups are the only ones, say if there was 5 or 10 individuals in your family group say, would be the only ones who can access the particular media.
So if you want to share, say, your videos or your holiday in Mexico kind of thing with your family out in Europe, then you can invite them into a private group. At that point, they can actually receive the stuff down to their cell phone and watch that video.
The one important difference of this is that the service isn’t a download service. We’re actually doing what I would say, streaming, although our technology isn’t actually streaming technology.
GOB: What is it then?
ML: Well, based on the intellectual property that we developed, the concept of our transmission is something called media objects. So that makes our system more transparent than others – and because we don’t need mobile media gateways and all kinds of other special protocols – this is a player that sits on the cell phone. It actually looks itself like a little web browser. When video and audio and such is being played on the handset, what it’s actually doing is, from the perspective of the network, it appears as if it’s browsing these little web pages, which we call media objects.
So these media objects get pulled from the player on the handset from a central server somewhere over the Internet and then are reconstructed on the fly in the handset. So in reality, if I were an operations person looking at the network, I would see a handset basically browsing these little web pages repeatedly. In essence, that’s how we encode our media into this concept called media objects.
GOB: Now, how does that impact the consumer’s bill? You know, their air time and data use and all that?
ML: Like any other service, if you use movy.tv and our system, basically, you’re going to be using up airtime for data with your cellular carrier. So because of that, you’ll have to either have an unlimited data rate package, like a flat-rate data rate package with your carrier. And we have had some early discussions with a couple of carriers about a flat-rate package for movy.tv so it would be a $7 a month, or $10 a month package for you to subscribe to movy.tv.
Otherwise, most carriers today are introducing unlimited data rate plans. So if one can subscribe to that then you should be able to access movy.tv within your plan, and not incur heavy usage charges.
GOB: No concern that you might get confused between movy and Mobi -TV?
ML: Yeah, well movy, I guess, is just a shortened form of our corporate name, Movidity. We sort of raced around and looked at different types of names in the dot-com space and everything else. So movy, kind of, being shortened for Movidity also sounds like movie, also sounds like Sony in terms of the way that you say Sony.
So we sort of settled on that after about a few dozen different potential names, and decided to just put the stake in the ground and go for it. There is potential for confusion there but I think there’s going to be enough differentiation in what we’re doing.
GOB: Will people be able to access it other than on wireless? Can they go on their laptop or whatever?
ML: Yeah, certainly. So in essence, if you’ve ever been to YouTube, it’s going to sort of look and smell the same sort of way that YouTube does. You’ll get onto a web site. You’ll upload your media, your video and things of that nature. You’ll tag it, so you’ll say it’s a comedy or a sci-fi or whatever the case it is. Then it gets stored on our services and put into a database, and then it’s searchable by the community. If you create a private group then of course only that private group can see that particular media.
In the case of broadcasters, what we’re basically doing is we’re either asking them to give us their content in archival format which we’ll put on the movy.tv platform. So for instance, it could be short films or movies, things of that nature, or we will take their live feed and we’ll put it through and give them, essentially, a channel on movy.tv.
GOB: So how do you make money then, is it advertising?
ML: Good point. Right now we’re approaching two traditional revenue models. One is advertising and the other is subscription. We have the option of injecting advertising within an uploaded video stream. So if you’re watching, let’s say, your friend’s vacation movie from Mexico, then you may actually get a five second advertisement that’s injected into that stream either at the beginning or end of it.
The second revenue stream is really paid subscribers, and those would be things like broadcasters, corporations, etc., who (pay) a fee to join. In that case, we won’t be doing advertising injection. It’ll be free of that because those organizations may already have imbedded advertising within their content.
GOB: Now, who are you backed by?
ML: The R&D and the development of the system has actually been relatively expensive just because the complexity of it. So we have been essentially management backed. It’s angel-funded at this point. As we move forward and go to this commercialization phase and launch in January, we’re going to be looking for further funding, just like any sort of early-stage company.
GOB: What timeframe in January are you launching?
ML: January 15 is what we’ve actually announced and we’re racing to get to that point. There’s a lot of small things that have to be dealt with in terms of technology. So we may not be 100% during our launch but we understand that. We basically just want to get out to the public and start showing people what we can actually do.
GOB: And how are you going to market it and pitch so people will be familiar with it and know its different than YouTube or whatever else is out there?
ML: What we’re really depending upon is the viral marketing ability of the Internet to kind of pass this along and get people interested. So I would say our investment in marketing is minimal at this point. What we’re really looking at is attracting content providers and just people who want to see stuff on their mobile devices.
GOB: How many hours of video do you think you’ll have when you launch?
ML: It’s a good question. We’re actually trying to slim down on what we’re going to have so that we can manage our ability to get up and running. At this point we’re talking to a number of people that actually you might be familiar with. Movieola, for instance, the short film channel.
GOB: Oh, yeah. Very good channel.
ML: Yeah, so it looks like – and I can’t necessarily announce this at this point – but we may have some of that content online. We have a few other interesting things in the pipe that are in discussions now. Everything from tourist films from Peru to 600 instructional golf videos that are about 90 seconds to three minutes long. What was interesting was when we made this announcement it only took 24 hours to sort of span the globe, and it was translated into about a dozen different languages… we were hit by inquiries from all over the place, every language, every country, oddly enough. When I saw our news release translated into Vietnamese and started getting inquiries from Vietnam, I was kind of taken aback. This is sort of the testament of this viral marketing ability of the Internet.
GOB: How do you see it evolving?
ML: We’re throwing a whole bunch of things into the pot and enabling them all through a single portal. We’ve heard a lot of comments like, “Well, what’s going to happen to movy.tv? What’s going to happen to the smaller video sharing web sites, and other independent mobile broadcasters?” My response is, “Well, things evolve and things change.” It’s each man for himself at this point, and see how it goes.
GOB: There’s room for anybody who does it right.
ML: I think what’s really generating an interest on our part in what we’ve announced is basically this wide-ranging capability from everything to archival video to your kid crashing on a skateboard, to hundreds of live television channels, radio channels, special interest… specifically built around wireless… So everything we’ve done is hinging pretty much on that. Although, you can use it the same way as you do any other streaming provider over the Internet, we have that significant twist on it.
