Mobilising content cash

Improving platforms and a hungry audience have created a market for mobile video services. Now the race is on for service operators to source the content required to feed this appetite. Digital Broadcast speaks to key stakeholders as they look to monetise mobile TV.

With ever increasing competition for eyeballs thanks in part to the swelling number of FTA channels in the region and the glut of video available on the internet – both legally and illegally – broadcasters are keen to find new ways to reach their audience.

For news services in particular mobile video creates the perfect opportunity for short, snappy and immediate delivery.

“We’re hoping within the next three months we’ll have an expanded range of offerings. SMS, MMS, catch-up and 3G services,” says Steven Hall, CEO, CNBC Arabia.

“Currently, the content providers get a very small piece of the revenue pie and clearly, an adjustment has to be made in this regard. I think we need an altogether new business model to generate increased traffic and access to content. This will require a partnership between the telcos, content owners and the regulators,” claims Hall.

The terms of this new partnership will determine the relative success for each party. Hall is under no illusions about which direction the balance of power needs to swing for mobile video services to succeed.

“The existing revenue model doesn’t encourage content owners and providers to create tailored services for mobile. It sounds like a tired phrase, but content is king. You can have the best delivery system in the world, but without rich content viewers won’t be interested,” says Hall who goes on to say that broadcasters and telcos need to find common ground to benefit from each other’s strengths.

“There are things that we do best, and there are things that they do best. Telecoms operators are not producers. In the instances where telcos have gone into production it has been with very mixed success,” points out Hall.

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One advantage CNBC Arabia has is that it is already producing all its content in Arabic. With a shortage in this area across all new media formats, the opportunity for Arabic language TV broadcasters across many of these platforms is obvious.

“It does give us an advantage to be producing entirely in Arabic,” says Hall. “We have a loyal and growing audience for the TV channel and I believe that this will transfer to our new media enterprises as well. Our content provides depth and analysis entirely in Arabic and there is a real demand for that across the Middle East.”

Content acquisition is obviously not the problem for producers such as CNBC. Those from outside the production business have more trouble and depend on aggregators or in-house efforts.

Production and distribution company A2 Avalon recently launched operations in the Middle East. With a library of 11,000 hours of material, A2 Avalon is in a position to offer vast swathes of programming to operators. There are often complications in the Middle East with the rights for stocks of content often split among several buyers across different platforms.

“Owning the rights on all formats was the deal breaker, I didn’t want the library under any other conditions,” says A2 Avalon CEO, Talaat Captan.

“That is the only way to exploit content today. We are discovering a new market [online] and the internet is here to stay. We have the rights for the library for the next ten years so we will ease into web distribution,” explains Talaat.

In addition to the internet, Captan also expects mobile TV operators to take an interest in the A2 Avalon library.

“The telcos will prove significant customers for us and we will be offering the entire library to mobile network operators. The attention span for mobile video is only a few minutes. Music will be a popular option for mobile content, this works very well on a handset. Not many people are going to be watching full-length movies on a mobile phone,” predicts Captan.

This is a view shared by Basher Dahabra, founder and CEO of Info2Cell, a value added service provider and content aggregator for mobiles.

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