Telecoms networks rush to cash in on user-generated content

Home videos, beauty contests and party stunts: the future of mobiles

Copying YouTube and MySpace may at last give phone groups a use for 3G

Informa has some stats on video community users

2006: 46m $35m -- 2007: 63m $51m -- 2008: 81m $70m -- 2009: 110m $95m -- 2010: 146m $114m -- 2011: 199m $132m

But why why why is this happening? Should be the question on the lips of strategy directors at all mobile companies.

We are all onto something

Virgin Mobile's head of digital services and new product development, Nick White, reckons such services are attractive to consumers because they represent "the collision of 'everybody can be a celebrity' with 'everybody's got a platform to perform on'."

This year Virgin Mobile ran a competition to find a new band to open the V Festival outdoor music event. Now that Virgin Mobile is part of the NTL cable empire, it is looking to put user-generated content on TV, increasing the attraction of getting involved.

Rival O2 ran a similar search for a new band, called O2 Undiscovered. It has also been experimenting with user-generated content through its "Look At Me" service, where users send in clips of themselves doing a party piece, in the hope that other people will watch.

"We are all on to something," says Russ Shaw, capability and innovation director at O2. "We are seeing some of these sites start to get real traction online and now we are seeing similar things happen in the mobile world."

Yeah but what is that something - and I can tell you its a little bit beyond "I can be a celebrity"

But it seems that marketeers like to reduce to the lowest common denominator - prefeering shallow insight to deep insight that ultimately could unable them to be more successful, more profitable, more valuable as a brand and reduce churn.

Apparently Vodafone are thinking about creatng their own mobile commuunity - now thats interesting.

Because we tried so hard to get Vodafone to take on a project that really could have taken them to the heart of peer to peer flows of communication. Hey guys its still on the table if you are interested.

Its called This is Modern Britain. So if any other telecoms operators out there want a global format with a local footprint that is designed and built to initiate massive dataflows, designed to change behaviour, created, not out of shallow insight but a deep understanding of why we are uploading downloading and sharing we would be very happy to hear from you.

Rather than innovating, people copy - but why are You Tube and Myspace so successful, google, ebay, Craigslist - because they innovated.

Comments

[Paul Jardine]

Absolutely, and I think you are right that on a mobile it will be much more community based. People will not pay the data rates to download some random piece of crap video, but if it makes it into the community, then they will.
I fear that the operators will try to wall up the garden though, and in doing so, kill everything.

[Belstaff Chaquetas De Cuero]

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