Movidity Takes Unique Approach to Mobile Video Sharing

Movidity wants its movy.tv site to be the YouTube of the wireless world, the video-sharing site of choice for the millions of cell phone and PDA users worldwide. The only problem is that YouTube—not to mention Revver and countless others—wants to be the YouTube of the wireless world, too. It seems that everybody wants to be YouTube, even YouTube.

Toronto-based Movidity unveiled its YouTube-wannabe plans on November 17, calling its not-yet-formally-launched movy.tv site "the first truly mobile video sharing web service." Then, less than two weeks later, a deal between YouTube and Verizon was announced. The deal would allow subscribers to Verizon's VCast video service to access a select subset of YouTube's videos as part of their $15 monthly V Cast fee. That was big news for a couple of days, until Verizon announced it had struck a similar deal with Revver, the YouTube rival known for its generous 50/50 revenue splitting with content providers. Revver believes that treating video producers fairly will garner them higher quality content.

But Movidity CEO Mauro Lollo seemed nonplussed by the YouTube and Revver news when I spoke with him recently.

"Having a flat fee is a way for Verizon to drive better revenues and margins out of the V Cast service, but the question is ‘Will people be willing to pay for that sort of single application for a flat rate?’," said Lollo. "And there's some amount of restrictiveness to what they’ve been offering. But we’ll see how it goes. It’s a big world and there’s a lot of opportunity and options for people to explore it. We’ll have our day in the sun."

Lollo's confidence may indeed be justified. Only Verizon users with expensive phones and deep enough pockets will be able to afford access to YouTube videos through V Cast. And, as Lollo said, there will be a restrictiveness to the content (at least initially). Apparently, only a subset of YouTube's videos will be available. Both Verizon and YouTube have been vague about how many videos will be chosen, by whom, and using what criteria. Critics say the whole appeal of YouTube is the ability to search through a vast catalog and the freedom for endusers to make their own choices about which videos they'll watch. This advantage is lost when choice is restricted by an editorial authority.

The content-sharing relationship between Revver and Verizon is also vague. Content will come only from those providers who have "opted to allow their content to be shared via V Cast," according to the Revver press release, which also stated that "V Cast subscribers will have access to some of the most popular content from a variety of Revver's video creators," and left the impression that it would be a sort of small best-of subset of Revver's entire repository.

Movidity may have its place in the sun due to the fact that it is totally independent of any single telco operator or handset manufacturer. Today, if cell phone users want to access a YouTube video, they have to go through a middle man (V Cast) and pay a fee. With Movidity technology, a user will be able to bypass any middle men and pull videos directly from the movy.tv website. According to Lollo, anyone who has a Java-enabled handset will be able go directly to the movy.tv site and either stream or download videos. "What we’re looking at is sort of using a wireless extension to the Internet to be able to move media down to a mobile subscriber," he says. "So without having to subscribe to a service like V Cast you should be able to receive our signals and interact with the media."

Users will first, however, have to download the Movidity video player to their handsets. "Our real claim to fame is being able to write a very efficient media application in a low-performing programming language like Java and actually have it work across many different types of handsets and devices," says Lollo. "Our player will run on any standard Java handset. Today there are hundreds of millions of those devices out in the hands of consumers, and almost all but the very low-end ones can run a Java application. And so we built our player and our platform from scratch in order to have as much breadth of choice as possible and to be transportable across operating systems."

There is one catch here, however. "So in reality, you’re going to be using bandwidth, which is sort of like airtime for data transmission through your carrier," says Lollo. "So ideally, one has to have an unlimited data rate plan with your mobile operator. But once that is done, it is pretty much open."