Vodafone’s complete lack of interest in mobile TV has always baffled us, but it has pursued a country by country strategy, and is always looking for applications that it can charge money for, driving up ARPU. Which is why it is so strange that suddenly from the Vodafone UK web site you can sign up for Babelgum, well known for being a free service an costing nothing.
Vodafone hasn’t gone lock stock and barrel into Babelgum but appears to be showing it off in the UK, and the logic is that it will drive up mobile broadband usage and therefore sign ups.
Babelgum is perhaps the less famous cousin of Joost, a peer to peer free application which can be downloaded over the internet for watching TV. Joost was written by those clever people that brought us Skype, which offers free and cheap phone calling around the world, achieved in the same way.
But unlike other US internet TV excursions, on the one hand YouTube, where content is made by its users, and Hulu where the major TV networks provide the content, both Joost and Babelgum have tried to nail down their own contracts containing professional content which is not viewable elsewhere. Babelgum is based in Ireland and funded by the billionaire owner of Italy’s fast growing telecoms company, Fastweb, who has sold millions of shares to pay for the creation of Babelgum.
We understand that Vodafone is just looking at Babelgum for the next six months and we imagine that the mobile client will have had to have been re-written especially for this, otherwise your phone might be used to partially serve video across the net, and that would soon exhaust your data cap even on a flat rate broadband service. Instead, like Skype, the PCs around the world, which run the service, will simply act collectively as a server for handsets.
The service is initiated as a simple program download from the Vodafone Live site and will allow Vodafone UK 3G contract customers with a flat rate mobile internet bundle, to access Babelgum video ‘ much of it live music events ‘ for free. The download works on Nokia N96, N95 and 6210 handsets and promises comedy clips, music exclusives and even independent and mainstream films.
Perhaps Vodafone seems to be finally understanding, that the pull to get people to sign up for mobile broadband is lots of broadband applications available for free. Coincidentally, this week Joost said that it would abandon the user of P2P techniques in futures versions of the service.