Vivendi To Take On YouTube, MySpace
French media giant Vivendi is funding a startup dubbed “Vivendi Mobile Entertainment” to build a new content portal to take on News Corp.’s MySpace and Google’s YouTube, according to a report from French business journal Les Echos (Google translation). They’ve tapped Universal Music Mobile head Cédric Ponsot to lead a team of 80 employees, with offices in Paris.
The new service would launch first in France this fall, and then expand throughout Europe. The plan is for a paid service that will be accessible across web, mobile and cable platforms.
Vivendi owns mobile company SFR and cable provider Canal+, which represent approximately 28 million combined subscribers. Vivendi also owns scads of premium content across media, including music, film, television and video games.
This would be the second time around for Vivendi, who partnered with Vodafone at the turn of the century for the now-shuttered “Vizzavi.” To get a sense of how things have changed, that time around they were going after Yahoo. Which makes me wonder — if they couldn’t beat Yahoo then, what makes them think they can beat News Corp. and Google now?
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[...] You’d think they’d have learned something from their previous failure in 2002 (”Vivazzi”. What a stupid name.) and their current alliance with YouTube. Instead, Vivendi plans to launch a paid mobile video service called “Vivendi Mobile Entertainment“. [...]
Vivendi to Launch Paid Mobile Video Service
— 5:49 AM on May 29, 2007
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Well they got one thing right. The part about the service “..that will be accessible across web, mobile and cable platforms” is an idea whose time has come. I have been crying myself hoarse about this for years and have made that the core of my technology. The bottom line is this – You cannot make consumers suddenly switch to a new technology (in this IPTV), when there is not a whole lot of value add from the old technology (Cable TV). You need a cross-platform strategy.
They lost me at “paid”.
ditto Mike Abundo