Matt Kapko

RCR Wireless News
Concerts are nothing new on mobile. Sprint Nextel Corp. aired the first concert on mobile in 2005 with a huge marketing push behind a Bon Jovi concert that year. Others have followed since then.

Verizon Wireless gets the nod for being the first carrier to broadcast a concert live over its network, which it did last month during an intimate Madonna concert in New York City.

The category got another boost last month when AT&T Mobility launched an exclusive concerts channel on its Mobile TV with FLO service on MediaFLO USA Inc.’s network.

Each of the nation’s top three carriers have experimented with varying approaches to artist performances. While there are many similarities, there are also distinct differences.

Sprint, the early pioneer

Sprint Nextel has done a mix of live and taped recordings that it makes available on-demand for later viewing, said Aaron Radelet, a company spokesman.

The carrier determines what artists’ customers are most interested in and will either cut a major sponsorship with them, put on an intimate, private show with the artist or tag along for a select performance, Radelet said.

Last year, the carrier was the only U.S. mobile operator to provide footage from the Live Earth concerts around the world, he said. Much of its content remains available and is indexed by song title and artist name.

On the Sprint Exclusive Entertainment channel, the carrier plays an average of 200 clips a week, Radelet said.

The carrier has also done exclusive on-demand concerts with Busta Rhymes, Juanes, Wolfmother and 50 cent.

Verizon’s deep catalog

Ed Ruth, VZW director of music, said the carrier has been doing taped live performances for two to three years now through various artist and venue partnerships, including Live Nation.

Since the company put on an intimate Madonna concert at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom last month, it’s top two clips on its Vcast service have been from that show, Ruth said.

“The majority of what we do is going to be on-demand,” he said. “There are going to be strategic partnerships that we absolutely want to do live ventures with.”

He called the MediaFLO service an option that the company is looking into for live performances, which fit in very will with the format. He hinted at some major announcements the carrier plans to unveil soon.

“It’s part of a larger strategy for us,” Ruth said. “This is an opportunity for us to showcase a concert in general,” he said. “There are many different valuable traits to it.”

And because of that, the carrier packages performance videos with behind-the-scenes footage and other content that will give fans a look at another layer of the artist, Ruth added.

Prior to selecting artist partners, Ruth said the carrier considers the artist’s performing ability, album quality, how easy the artist might be to work with and what issues it might run into surrounding licensing and other clearance dilemmas.

The carrier inks about 10 deep relationships with artists a year.

AT&T, Control Room, MediaFLO

When AT&T Mobility launched its Mobile TV with FLO service last month, it came out swinging with a 24/7 exclusive channel dedicated to concerts.

Control Room, a production and distribution company, signed a deal with the carrier to provide full concert footage from about 30 artists to air in 24-hour cycles on the channel each day. One day might be Lenny Kravitz and the next might be Rage Against the Machine.

The channel is exclusive to AT&T for 60 days.

Mike Bailey, VP of programming at MediaFLO USA, said MediaFLO selects which artists to air and decided to run the channel in 24-hour blocks while Control Room provides the content and helps optimize the channel for the FLO service.

“Our MTV channel is extremely popular, and the Control Room channel has also proven highly successful. We anticipate that music-related content, including live concerts, will continue to play a key role in our programming going forward,” he wrote in response to questions.

“As a part of a well-balanced programming lineup, we believe music … has a key role to play in attracting customers, particularly younger customers, to the FLO TV service.”

Bailey declined to release any specific viewing data. As to why the channel is only being made available for 60 days, Bailey said MediaFLO has seen great success with limited-duration channels that it’s done previously with X Games and Big Brother.

“We believe that these special programming offerings help to keep the service fresh and exciting for consumers,” he said.

GoTV on the concert experience

GoTV Networks Inc. has centered much of its concert programming on the experience a fan would have if they were at the concert or festival, Possum Hill, an executive producer at the company, wrote in response to questions.

“We hit as many concerts and festivals as possible,” Hill wrote. Viewership increased when the company started including snippets of live concert performances in addition to its acoustic lounge performance, Hill added.

“With the crazy costs of festivals and concerts these days, people want to see their favorite acts some how, some way.”

RCR Wireless News
SAN FRANCISCO — You could cut the anticipation with a knife leading up to Apple Inc.’s Worldwide Developer Conference this morning. The company delivered the iPhone 3G to thunderous applause more than 75 minutes into a nearly two-hour presentation.

The sold-out event brought 5,200 people to the company’s annual gathering for developers and kicked off with details about the iPhone 2.0 software, App Store and 11 new application demonstrations from developers.

“I think it’s widely believed that this is the phone that changed phones forever,” CEO Steve Jobs said.

Calling the iPhone “one of the most amazing products I’ve ever had the pleasure of being involved with,” Jobs checked off five major areas that Apple was pressed to improve on — 3G support, GPS functions, enterprise features, third-party applications, more scale and a lower price — and he said the company delivered on each with the new device. The 3G iPhone is scheduled to launch in 22 countries on July 11.

“We did figure out what our next challenges are, the next mountain we have to climb to go to the next level,” Jobs said. Although 6 million iPhones have been sold thus far, Jobs said the price must drop before reaching greater scale.

“We need to make the iPhone more affordable,” he said. Apple hopes to sell 10 million iPhones by year’s end. The company currently commands a 2.6% share of the handset market in the United States and 0.6% worldwide, according to Strategy Analytics.

The lower price

The 3G, 8GB iPhone will sell for $200 in the United States, with the more spacious 16 GB model priced at $299 — both with a 2-year contract at AT&T Mobility. (The first-generation iPhone continues to be listed on the AT&T Mobility site at $399 for the 8GB model and $499 for the 16GB model, though both are tagged as “temporarily out of stock.”) The pricing likely comes as bad news for handset vendors trying to catch up with the first generation of the device.

Further, the new pricing indicates a new business model for Apple and AT&T Mobility.

“The new agreement between Apple and AT&T Mobility eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which the carrier shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple,” AT&T said in a statement. “Under the revised agreement, which is consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements, there is no revenue sharing and both iPhone 3G models will be offered at attractive prices to broaden the market potential and accelerate subscriber volumes.”

AT&T Mobility said it expects iPhone subsidies to dilute its earnings per share by 10 cents to 12 cents through the end of next year. The carrier said things will then turn around in 2010.

AT&T said unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, in addition to voice plans starting at $40 a month. Business users will pay $45 per month for data, in addition to a voice plan.

Click here for more details on AT&T’s plans for the 3G iPhone.

The developers

Scott Forstall, senior VP of iPhone software, introduced 11 different engineers that each has developed applications that will be available through Apple’s iPhone App Store at launch or shortly after. Sega, eBay, Loopt, TypePad, Associated Press, Pangea Software, Cow Music, MLB.com, Modality, MIMvista and Digital Legends Entertainment all showcased their applications built for the device to varying levels of “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowd.

“We’ve developed for nearly every mobile platform; this one is the best,” Loopt’s Sam Altman said. “We think this is a new era in mobile.”

Apple’s Forstall also introduced a new feature that allows iPhone users to receive notifications of changes on an application even when the user isn’t actively using the application. Instant messaging messages and more will be made available through a new Apple Push Notification Service that maintains one consistent link with the device, rather than requiring multiple applications to run in the background.

Click here for more details on forthcoming iPhone applications.

The specs

During his presentation, Jobs showed off the iPhone’s performance over a Wi-Fi hotspot, a 3G network and an EDGE connection. The new device pulled up NationalGeographic.com over 3G in 21 seconds and took 59 seconds on the EDGE network. Wi-Fi clocked the site in at 19 seconds. “You can see that the 3G speeds are actually approaching Wi-Fi,” Jobs said.

The “3G” aspect of the new iPhone calls out the device’s tri-band HSDPA support in the 850/1900/2100 MHz bands in addition to its quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support from the previous model. (No word in Apple’s press release about support for HSUPA technology, which AT&T Mobility has baked into its recent network upgrades.) Apple claims the device will have 10 hours of talk time in GSM mode and 5 hours of talk time in UMTS mode. The device continues to include Wi-Fi capabilities as well inside its new, slimmer profile.

Speaking of aesthetics, the 3G iPhone will now come in two colors: black for both models and white for the 16GB model. The new colors are rendered in plastic that will replace the previous models’ aluminum casing.

The new device also includes assisted GPS technology and Bluetooth 2.0, which were both lacking in the original model. The GPS functionality was central to several new applications that were presented during the event that also highlighted new applications developed for the iPhone platform through its software development kit.

Apple also touted the new device’s support for enterprise applications, as well as Apple’s new MobileMe service that pushes e-mail, contacts and calendar events from a central Apple server to the iPhone. The MobileMe service is set to replace Apple’s previous .mac service.

Other “improvements” to the device include a flush headphone jack and the inclusion of a “SIM ejector tool.”

RCR Wireless News
MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — The writing team of Terry Rossio and Jocelyn Stamat wasn’t allowed to write during the 100-day-long writer’s strike that ended last February, but they were able to think and imagine — and that’s exactly what they did.

Enter “HighSpeed Dating,” a new made-for-mobile and online short sketch comedy series that got its first preview here at the MEFCON conference last week.

“This is sort of speed dates gone horribly wrong,” said Rossio, an Oscar-nominated writer/producer who’s worked on “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Déjà vu,” “The Mask of Zorro,” “Shrek” and others.

Rossio was drawn to the idea and the medium because it emphasizes ideas, performance and writing with a much more immediate return, he said. “You don’t need a lot of spectacle to have fun with these and you can explore the human condition in an endless amount of ways,” Rossio added.

“It lent itself to something that we could do on our own. On some of these big movies — on “Déjà Vu” I think it was like seven years in creation,” he said. “A lot of times you embark on these projects and the reward is years away, if at all.”

But even more powerful than that is the appeal of maintaining control of the entire project down to the final two-minute clip, he said.

So far they’ve shot 10 episodes and have spent $28,500 thus far with plenty of post-production and more costs still to come. Frank Chindamo, who runs Fun Little Movies, a mobile video production company, said he was absolutely thrilled at the opportunity, just marveling at the scripts.

“This is like the best made-for-mobile script I’ve ever seen,” he recalled thinking after Rossio and Stamat first presented him with the idea. The company is now meeting with potential sponsors to come on board before it releases the series later this year.

The pair of clips shown at MEFCON were quick witted, wasted no time moving the story along and got laughs from the audience along most of the way.

Sketch comedy on mobile is about eccentric characters, diving right into the topic and presenting ideas that are entertaining, interesting and might even make you think a bit, Rossio said. Every word has to be funny, give a characterization or move the story forward, he said.

“To do comedy pieces like this … you get the sense that you are really bound by what people want to see,” Stamat said.

“They want to be rewarded and they have to be rewarded otherwise you’re losing them in 30 seconds,” she said. “It’s better to err on the side of being quick.

Stamat, who is also a trained professional surgeon, admits the idea originally stemmed from her own failed attempts at speed dating.

Rossio said content for mobile and online will garner more value and industry-wide recognition in the next couple years.

“It’s a meritocracies system,” he said, adding that it will quickly get included in industry award categories and such with more popularity surrounding the medium.

Indeed, Fun Little Movies won the content award at the 2008 Mobile Entertainment Forum awards last month and other organizations are honoring content producers for their work in mobile.

“It’s not another summer movie that someone’s shoving down your throat with advertising,” Rossio said. Recognition will flow from viewers upward.

RCR Wireless News
MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — Dan Lyons, the man behind “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” began his online experiment as the sensational alter ego of Apple Inc.’s CEO mostly because he hated his job at Forbes and was “freaking out” about the future of journalism and his place in it.

“My job sucked. It was so bad,” he said to raucous laughter during a 30-minute keynote here at the Mobile Entertainment Forum conference. “Covering IBM is like sticking your head in a meat grinder every day.”

So Lyons figured why not give this blogging thing a go. “I’m not old enough to retire and I don’t have enough money to retire, so I started freaking out, like really freaking out,” he said. “I thought I better get some online experience.”

What transpired over the next year is the stuff made for TV or the big screen — indeed, Lyons is in talks now to create a film or TV show about his story.

When Lyons’ editors at Forbes rejected his request for a new blog or a job on the dot-com side of the operation, he struck out on his own in his free time.

“I just wanted to learn how to do html,” he explained, adding that he took the site down after six weeks. His uncensored posts made their onto someone else’s site, he brought it back up and before he knew it, 1,000 people were reading his blog regularly.

His site grew to 90,000 unique visits and he’d sold a book all before anyone figured out who this anonymous Steve Jobs wannabe was.

A manhunt quickly got underway, brought on largely by a column from — wait for it — his editor at Forbes who set up a quasi-contest to out the Fake Steve Jobs.

“I’m like, dude I work for you,” Lyons said to a now enthralled audience.

“Finally he started writing to me trying to hire me at Forbes,” he said. “You mean the same assholes that wouldn’t hire me before.”

Then an investment firm that owns half of Forbes began recruiting him for hire. Eventually, he brought it all in-house at Forbes, but not before he got his agent in the mix to negotiate a new arrangement. Soon after, a reporter at The New York Times figured him out and everyone knew the man behind the popular blog that now generates 600,000 visitors.

Sour apple

So why Steve Jobs?

“I imagine Steve Jobs being really mean and just a total (insert expletive here),” he said.

“The blog’s really, really, really offensive and nasty,” he said. “Apple’s never gotten that mad about it, but they don’t have much of a sense of humor about it.”

Taking it to mobile

Now he’s thinking about the next frontier — mobile.

In Japan, three of the top 10 novels last year were typed on cellphones and read on cellphones, he said.

“Writing another book is like the last thing I ever imagine wanting to do right now,” he said, but the idea of a serialized mobile writing venture intrigues him greatly.

“I don’t know where this is going to go but I think it’s going to be huge,” Lyons said. “I think technology can kind of give rise to new content.”

So what does the Fake Steve Jobs think of the iPhone? “I just couldn’t deal with the slow browsing speed of the original iPhone,” he said. “Now I’m waiting to get the 3G iPhone.”

He thinks Google Inc.’s Android platform is a complete mess (he used another word) and digital rights management software is a “pain in the ass.”

“I feel like there’s a really easy way around DRM,” he said. Just buy the CD, rip it and do with it whatever you will. “It’s annoying, but it’s like really easy to get around.”

RCR Wireless News
Peter Adderton, the man behind Boost Mobile and Amp’d Mobile Inc., has unveiled his next business venture. And like those before it, the plan doesn’t lack one bit in the department of grandiose.

This time, William Morris Agency’s got his back. WMA represents authors, actors and entertainers.

For WMA, Adderton’s Agency 3.0 marks a new foray into the digital media space that brings together a group of veterans in entertainment, telecommunications, marketing and business development. The agency will consult, develop and build digital media businesses out of existing companies, Adderton told RCR Wireless News.

Adderton and his team are thinking big. “I’m about game changing,” he said.

“To be honest, I’d like to take something on like Sprint,” Adderton added. “Because that’s a challenge.”

Later on, he mentioned Motorola Inc.

Both Motorola and Sprint Nextel Corp. are suffering serious financial difficulties.

The old crew

In his latest venture, Adderton teamed with longtime business partner Steve Stanford, the founder and CEO of Voce, an MVNO that imploded even more quickly, and in the same spectacular fashion, as Adderton’s Amp’d Mobile. Adderton and Stanford took light-hearted jabs at each other’s not-so-distant business failings. Stanford was also COO at Amp’d Mobile and senior VP at Boost Mobile.

Success and failure follow the pair like shadows, yet both presented a sense of clarity as they played up their strengths and experience while culling the successes they found in even the businesses that have ended in tatters.

“We’re going to do what we do well and stick to it,” Adderton said.

Pointing to accolades on marketing and development initiatives that were driven internally at Boost and Amp’d, Agency 3.0 plans to capitalize on those skills and more for a wide pool of clients already available at WMA and others that are showing interest.

The team said it is already working with some big names in wireless, but was not yet able to name any.

Urging improvement

Agency 3.0 is taking on everything from marketing and pricing to business models while playing an equally heavy hand in the development of content and user interfaces. The group pointed to a series of areas where entertainment companies, large and small, will have to improve before they reach success in the digital arena.

Agency 3.0 has already done work on new logos for existing companies. It is also diving into programming and began consulting clients on what types of content it believes play best in different environments.

Content and marketing are not mutually exclusive, Adderton said. He’s learned how intrinsically linked they are. Adderton said he’s looking to take on companies just entering the digital space or those that have remained stagnant while more innovative platforms rise. He called wireless companies “low-hanging fruit” for the joint venture.

Adderton heads up the group as chairman and CEO. Stanford, a partner and president in the joint venture, will focus on content and entertainment, while Greg Johnson, partner and president, will target brands and agencies, building on his extensive experience in digital marketing campaigns. Finally, Scott Anderson is partner and chief creative officer of Agency 3.0. Anderson co-founded Boost and Amp’d with Adderton.

Agency 3.0 operates out of WMA’s Beverly Hills headquarters and ownership is shared among WMA, Adderton and the rest of the executive team.

RCR Wireless News
A new star is rising in mobile television and it’s all premised on the fact that people don’t want to pay for video on their cellphones. A few standout companies have blazed a path to free mobile content for consumers, but few, if any have grown as quickly as mywaves Inc.

Since the company launched in January 2007, it’s grown like wildfire. The company, which offers an off-deck portal to a vast catalog of licensed and unlicensed video, had more than 5 million unique users last December, just one year after it formed. More than 20 million users downloaded its application in that same period.

Rajeev Raman, co-founder and CEO of mywaves, and his team were convinced that there was a better answer than the $15 per month mobile TV offerings like Verizon Wireless’ Vcast TV and AT&T Mobility’s Mobile TV with FLO. Wireless subscribers are already paying for data usage, Raman said.

“No one should; but we certainly won’t ask them to pay on top of that,” he said last week in an interview at the Digital Hollywood conference.

“If you are a young adult and you are looking to your cellphone to serve a new need … we want to be a way for you to get that,” Raman said. “Mostly we want to be a way for you to get that without any money.”

Pre-roll ads

The Silicon Valley-based startup has licensed content from all the major networks and studios and only began inserting 15 second pre-roll ads into its licensed videos at the beginning of the year. In April, the company clocked more than a million ad impressions.

“You can only do it when you have some scale,” Raman said. “If you can’t move it in the millions of impressions per month, don’t do it. And that’s where we’re at.”

Although the business is entirely advertising based now and relies on those pre-rolls for revenues to share with content producers, it doesn’t shun the vast trove of unlicensed video available online as well.

Users can search for any type of video they’d like and the application will use that query to build an “auto channel,” which categorizes the unlicensed videos and make them available on the application for viewing. There are no advertisements and thus no money to be made, but Raman believes his company’s best step lies in providing a comprehensive mobile video platform, not one that only plugs content it’s making money on.

And by all measurements the approach isn’t eating into its revenue stream. “We haven’t seen any different intake in clips with ads and clips without ads,” he said.

Revenue split

The advertising revenue that’s split with content providers fluctuates depending on each partnership. Premium, popular content demands a heavier fee while mywaves will hold on to more of a piece if it sold the ads that roll prior to the video clip. The company has 21 advertisers on board now and offers a mix of clips that come to them with ads already included and others that allow mywaves to do its own ad sale.

“Some content is better, not all content is created equal,” he said.

Raman suggested there must be some secret club where all the content producers come together to compare how much scale they’re reaching in mobile because his company hears very little from them in terms of how much money mywaves is bringing in for them. They’re clearly more interested in metrics and usage numbers, which have been promising thus far, he said.

“The average user comes back to us eight times a month, twice a week. Their visit duration is about 19-and-a-half minutes per visit,” he said. “It’s true, the average clip length is about three minutes, but they watch an average of five clips.”

FREE PORN!!!!!

As for what type of content is doing best on mywaves (read: anything with the word “bikini” in it), the company is doing everything it can to meet that need, Raman said. But it will undoubtedly continue to fall short in some respects until the market matures and more protective measures are put in place.

“It’s very clear what they (end users) want. They want free porn. We can only do so much,” Raman said.

“I don’t know that we can really get there in terms of helping that group out,” he said. “The farthest we’ve done is we’ve licensed content from Sports Illustrated and their swimsuit issue and that’s done very well.”

The company has drawn the line at that point, and so it has licensing deals with MTV, Playboy and others for “bikini content,” but no nudity, Raman said. “The nude stuff is, quite frankly, problematic. It’s problematic for everyone.”

The category is the most popular on mywaves, comprising as much as 25% of all viewing, he said. Users can find unlicensed adult content on the auto channels, but otherwise mywaves is mostly taking a hands-off approach to that type of content.

Ads in a different frame

Taking a different approach to the ad-supported model, ScanScout has developed a video ad network that helps publishers make money off streaming videos while giving ad agencies a new path for advertisers to reach audiences, said Waikit Lau, the company’s co-founder, president and COO.

Lau, who sat on the same panel as Raman at Digital Hollywood, said his company’s end game is to put control over the ad with the end user. So instead of interstitial ads, which may run prior to, during or after a clip, ScanScout is doing overlay advertising.

“We’re serving ads into hundreds of millions of streams a month,” he said.

Rather than taking up the entire video frame, ScanScout injects a translucent ad in the lower fifth or third of the video frame, which the user can control, Lau said.

He argued that pre-roll ads are more difficult to measure because a user could set the device down while the ad is playing or shut off the clip before it plays, for example. Overlay ads are better for advertisers because companies are able to track duration views, Lau said. But he still doesn’t see a company like mywaves as a competitor because interstitial and overlays can complement a larger bundle offering that companies can make available to ad firms.

RCR Wireless News
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Like many other forms of entertainment, watching mobile TV wastes time — at least to some. For the executives running mobile entertainment companies that routinely talk about the medium as such, there’s an apparent sense of pride or ease that comes with this definition. If not pride, at least it simplifies the mobile television opportunity at large.

“We help people kill time. That’s what we do,” Viva Vision CEO Nick Montes said at last week’s Digital Hollywood conference.

“Mobile video is about killing time,” Handango Inc. CEO Bill Stone said earlier at the same event.

Do they really mean to kill time, let it go wasted? Or is that just shorthand for describing what consumers are most likely to watch on a small screen knowing full well all the barriers that stand in the way of that experience? Things like metrics, carrier control, the user experience and varying definitions of decency, just to name a few.

Setting aside live, broadcast models like MediaFLO USA Inc., which still have relatively little scale, content providers see plenty of room to grow and find a solid path to eyeballs on cellular networks, both on and off carrier decks. Yet, it’s no surprise many want the carriers to relinquish the referee position and let content flourish off-deck as freely as it does on board.

The carriers, which own and manage the pipe that video is delivered through in this case, typically take 35% of revenues right off the top, Montes said on a panel of mobile video executives.

“Off-deck’s not going to go anywhere in a substantial way until the business model changes,” he said. “Until there’s a significant change on that from the carrier community, I don’t see any change for off-deck.”

Montes said carrier executives routinely tell him off the record that they know the system is broken. Something that’s evidenced by hard numbers, he argued.

Data revenues down

Data revenues fell overall for the first time ever in the second half of 2007, coming off gains in the first half of the year, he said.

“The business model for off-deck is, just right now, broken,” Montes said. “The industry hasn’t made it any easier for people to buy content.”

This all indirectly thwarts innovation, he said, and leaves part of the industry in a stare down.

Investors aren’t eager to contribute and drive innovation in mobile content under the current business model, Montes said; meanwhile carriers are worried about what financial hits they might suffer once the floodgates are shoved open.

Business models aren’t all to blame though.

“Today, the user experience is awful,” Stone said. It’s too difficult for consumers to find the content they’re looking for, he said. Moreover, the programming lineup for mobile looks like most companies have backed into the market with some of the least popular programs available.

People want big shows and brands right from the get-go, Stone said.

Enter Playboy

Enter Playboy Enterprises Inc. —there are few more widely recognized brands on the planet.

For a company that sprung up from America’s heartland, continues to make its home here and is built primarily on the beauty of unclothed Americans, it sure hasn’t been well received by the country’s wireless carriers.

The company that’s as much about the lifestyle of its founder Hugh Hefner as it is about glossy adult-oriented pictorials has developed a series of strategies and content offerings to meet varying degrees of tolerance within each country it does business.

“For us, our international business exponentially outgrows our domestic business today,” said Chris Petrovic, VP of business development in digital media at Playboy. “In general, there are just more progressive social norms that exist overseas,” he said on a panel, answering why carriers outside the United States are more willing to bring the Playboy brand on-deck.

Playboy content can be readily found on Verizon Wireless’ deck throughout the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico, for example. The company’s had some success getting on board with mobile virtual network operators, but that market’s been shaky at best of late. Still, Playboy is left out of the big picture. It’s nowhere to be found on any tier-one or tier-two carrier decks, Petrovic said.

“On the whole, folks that run programming for the international operators are much more progressive than the operators here,” he said, adding that Playboy is in all the major markets in Europe and Asia, almost 50 countries.

“Instead of continuing to fight with the carriers … we’re focusing our efforts on taking advantage of the channels that are available to us,” Petrovic said, citing outlets such as WAP sites and other direct-to-consumer, or off-deck, opportunities.

“We’re not relying on the carriers to make or break our mobile business here in the United States,” he said.

Although Playboy isn’t being invited to the dance by U.S. carriers, it’s finding success with mobile video and other content all on its own.

WAP sites are generating a lot of traffic in the United States, Petrovic said. With no marketing or advertising a series of WAP sites are getting 200,000 to 250,000 visits per week, he said.

And so, even though carriers abroad have embraced the company with more open arms, Playboy’s success on mobile in the United States is growing organically, almost entirely from brand name recognition.

Matthew Feldman, president and CEO of Versaly Entertainment, also sees a great deal of opportunity in off-deck.

“The carriers are delivering an inferior product right now,” he said, adding that if off-deck wasn’t a successful business model as it exists today, there wouldn’t be so much development around it.

Missing metrics

Everyone agreed that reporting and viewing metrics remain the most glaring missing piece of the puzzle.

“Anyone in the mobile industry will say reporting is probably one of the weakest segments of the mobile industry,” Feldman said.

Companies like his are trying to identify the demographics that are using mobile video, he said.

“We’re really inheriting a lot of business intelligence from the TV industry,” he said. But the wireless industry has failed to follow down that path to a large extent.

For that reason, Playboy prefers to try things first online, a place it views as a much better “breeding ground” since it allows managers to see the number of views, impressions and other usage statistics in real-time, Petrovic said.

“Whereas here (in mobile), you’re lucky if you get a revenue check at the end of every cycle,” he said.

MobiTV Inc., which has almost 4 million subscribers, has the same problem, said Jack Hallahan, VP of advertising and brand partnerships at the company. MobiTV knows what device type is watching at any time, but it still doesn’t know who that user is, he said.

“We don’t have a data point of exactly what’s happening on the last mile,” Hallahan added.

Despite the fact much of each user’s private information is unknown to the content provider, Feldman concluded that there’s still sufficient room to operate, albeit with a little hypothesizing and a lot of reliance on general knowledge.

“Content does drive demographics and true, the carriers are withholding consumer demographics from us, but if you’re showing Playboy content or full-contact fighting, there’s a certain demographic watching that,” he said.

RCR Wireless News
NEW YORK CITY — “This bus has been my home for the last three years,” said Jesse Jensema, supervising producer on Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Recording Studio, while Madonna’s rehearsal for her performance later that night played on screen.

“I live here and I sleep here,” the young and energetic recording engineer said. “I live in a recording studio.”

Parked just around the corner from the Roseland Ballroom where Madonna played for an intimate crowd of 3,000, the 45-foot-by-8-foot bus has lived a few lives before it came under Verizon Wireless’ watch, beginning at the Grammys earlier this year.

Its first act took it to schools and wherever students congregated as the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, which gave youths a free opportunity to make music and video under Jensema’s supervision.

Now the bus travels around the country, mostly on the West Coast, moving from one artist to another as a one-stop-shop for songwriting, rehearsal, recording, production and mastering — from idea to final product.

Why is Verizon Wireless sponsoring a recording studio bus?

“Increasingly, music matters to our bottom line,” said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson in an e-mail. “We’re now the second largest digital music seller in the U.S., after iTtunes. Vcast Music draws in news customers (they start paying attention when you are aligned with, say Madonna, or Timbaland, or Fergie), and then stay with us because of the cool offerings.”

Some of the songs recorded inside the bus are being made available exclusively to Verizon Wireless customers, oftentimes before the album hits store shelves. Video footage is also shot throughout the bus to give fans a backstage glimpse into the creative process.

Verizon Wireless has also brought on a “producer in residence,” Timbaland, to use the bus as home base for mixing and producing his new album.

Later this year, Verizon Wireless plans to compile a group of tracks from various artists for what it says will be the first-ever full album distributed straight to mobile.

“Usually it’s a very long, arduous process to get something to market,” Ed Ruth, Verizon Wireless’ director of music, said next to a drum kit, guitars and plush red leather bench seats onboard.

With the recording studio on a curve that’s unknown at this point, Jensema said it’s exciting to be working on this recording studio on wheels, which comes to the artist rather than the other way around. “The best part is it comes to you, you don’t have to go to the studio,” he said.

Plus, you always get the same equipment, the same people, the same environment and the same vibe, Jensema added.

“The vibe is where the creative juices flow from,” he said.

“We’re very versatile and we can manipulate the bus to do whatever it needs to,” said Jensema, who oversees audio and video production on a pretty consistent workflow.

He’s been working on the bus since he graduated from recording engineering three years ago and loving every minute of it. “History shines through these walls everyday,” he said.

RCR Wireless News
NEW YORK CITY — The tears, deafening screams and all-around giddiness were nonstop last night as Madonna played a six-song set at the Roseland Ballroom for a select group of wireless subscribers, promotion winners and hardcore fans.

The “Material Girl” took the stage shortly after 10 p.m. to perform some classic hits from her extensive catalog and debut a few songs off her new album, “Hard Candy.” Four of the songs she performed were broadcast live on Verizon Wireless’ Vcast Video while Vodafone customers were able to tune in live around the world in 15 countries.

The carriers said it was the first time a live concert was broadcast simultaneously on mobile around the globe as fans sang along in unison at the venue. The four songs have also been archived on Verizon Wireless’ Vcast Performances channel, which will be available to Verizon Wireless customers throughout the month. Exclusive video footage of Madonna, Timbaland and Justin Timberlake’s remix recording session is also available on the carrier’s video service.

The concert was extremely intimate, especially for Madonna who can (and does) sell out stadium after stadium on tour. Around 100 of the 3,000 people in attendance won the chance to be at the concert via a unique SMS barcode triggered by the download of the artist’s exclusive track with Verizon Wireless — the underground mobile remix of “4 Minutes” by Timbaland — as a ringtone, ringback tone or full track.

In total, Verizon estimates it gave away about 1,000 of the tickets to the exclusive event. Local radio stations also gave away a couple hundred tickets as promotions.

The live, one-to-many broadcast, which was ideally suited for MediaFLO USA Inc.’s network, was oddly missing from the mobile TV service. Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the carrier decided not to pursue an additional distribution outlet — Vcast Mobile TV — partly because it would have required a complex arrangement with an outside partner and its network.

Moreover, MediaFLO’s reach is limited; it is available on a select number of handsets in about 58 markets. While the event could have been a great opportunity for Verizon to broadcast content concurrently on its 3G network as well as MediaFLO’s broadcast-like network, the carrier seems to be holding off major promotion for its broadcast TV services until the offering reaches greater scale.

Demand for access to the concert was obviously greater than supply, evidenced by the diehard fans who were lining up on the sidewalk outside the venue the night prior (Madonna dedicated one of her older songs to that crew later in the show) and the few scalpers who were asking as much as $3,000 for tickets with no actual face value.

Madonna performed her first song of the night as giddy long-time fans rejoiced in the glow of one of the artist’s few (and nearly impossible to gain access to) small-venue shows. The artist has sold more than 200 million albums over the course of her two-decade-plus career.

As if Madge’s one-of-a-kind presence in an all black outfit with at least 20-hole boots, black pants with sequins and a top that practically left her cleavage spilling out wasn’t enough to keep the crowd at a feverish pitch, Justin Timberlake joined her on stage.

The screams hit a new level and tears flowed liberally as the duo performed their hit single, “4 Minutes,” for the third song of the night.

Following the song, Madonna thanked Timberlake for joining her on stage. “I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to be able to make a record with him, Timbaland and Pharrell (Williams),” she said. The latter two are in-demand producers with some of the highest rates in the business.

After three more songs, the performance came to an end rather quickly, leaving fans spilling out of the venue into the street no more than 35 minutes after Madonna first took stage. She never returned for an encore, but that didn’t seem to matter to the hundreds who were still grinning from ear to ear outside.

RCR Wireless News
AT&T Mobility’s MediaFLO-based mobile TV service has not yet officially launched; after a couple of false starts, the carrier appears set to launch the service, along with a pair of devices, in the coming weeks.

However, RCR Wireless News obtained an LG Electronics Co. Ltd. Vu handset that supports the service. After popping in our AT&T SIM card, we were able to purchase the AT&T Mobile TV with FLO service as an add-on for $15 a month. The service launched immediately and was working without error in our Los Angeles office.

Unsurprisingly, the service offers many of the same features and functions as Verizon Wireless’ MediaFLO-based mobile TV (which runs on the same Qualcomm Inc.-built network). But what’s holding our attention right now is a channel on the AT&T programming guide with “CNCRT” as its call letters. “Coming soon. Concerts exclusively on AT&T Mobile TV with FLO,” the screen reads alongside a stock photo of Avril Lavigne. No sound, no moving pictures yet, just that single image staring back at us.

AT&T declined to comment on what content will make its way to the channel once it’s live, but we’ve seen a few ads on the channels indicating bands like U2 and Dave Matthews Band might be hitting our LG Vu’s touchscreen soon. AT&T promises we’ll know more once the service launches.

We also had fun comparing the service with our at-home programming. Network shows are re-broadcast multiple times throughout the day on the MediaFLO deck, for instance. CNN and ESPN frequently use larger, full-screen text blocks to make news nuggets easier to read. And, audio and video quality has been consistent when there is a solid signal for the service while some pockets we visited in the Los Angeles and Orange County area went completely dark. At times, one channel would come in clear, then another would take awhile to acquire a signal.

After waiting more than a year since Verizon Wireless launched MediaFLO services last March, we’ve been holding out hope that AT&T had something more compelling up its sleeve to throw into the mix. And so, we’re anxious to see what AT&T has in store for the concerts channel. It was nice to see CNN recently added to the lineup (it’s election season, and we’re news junkies after all), but we’re having a hard time watching PIX, Sony Pictures Television’s channel. We’ve seen “Christine,” “Ghostbusters,” and “Flatliners” re-aired numerous times and hope the company plans to include much more of its extensive catalog before the service goes primetime.

From what we’ve seen, we think AT&T has a solid broadcast mobile TV offering that can compete and perhaps outpace the reach of Verizon Wireless’ Vcast Mobile TV. With the concerts channel and (hopefully) more services like datacasting on the way from MediaFLO, mobile TV just might strike the chord it’s failed to strum thus far.

Interestingly, AT&T’s mobile TV effort lands in a somewhat crowded space. Players range from SlingPlayer Mobile to MobiTV Inc. and GoTV Networks Inc., all of which run over carriers’ current cellular networks. And then there are TV broadcasters that might launch their own, independent service. Even Dish Network Corp., which is affiliated with Sling Media, has made a bet on wireless spectrum and announced a mobile TV trial soon .

As for MediaFLO, the service has suffered continued delays as Qualcomm waits for TV broadcasters to clear up the spectrum and move to digital-only broadcasts. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs lamented the sluggish pace of MediaFLO at a conference last month.