Mobishows gain ground

Covers: mobile phones, mobisodes, mobishows, TV

Sports intellectual property company Player One and the mobile TV arm of UK production company TwoFour are getting together to make sports content for mobiles, they announced last week.

They are looking at two areas:

*Mobisodes - mobile video clips linked to existing TV shows or that involve repurposing existing TV content, for example to produce boxing highlights.

*Mobishows – made for mobile shows, including specially-shot footage as well as some archive TV footage.

Pete Russell, managing director of Player One, took the realistic view that subscriptions for mobile content are hard to sell, except around relatively short events, such as The Ashes cricket series. His company and TwoFour Mobile will produce a cricket mobishow before and during the series.

Philip Bourchier O’Ferrall, head of TwoFour Mobile, said: “All the big three UK production companies - RDF, Endemol and TwoFour - have set up convergence TV divisions looking at content specifically for mobile and broadband.

“Ad revenue is going away from TV [and towards the internet] and, at the same time, viewers don’t want to watch so much advertising and are using Tivo [hard-disk recorders] to avoid it."

But he believes, mobile users will accept an advert at the beginning of a mobishow they want to watch.

“It’s all about capturing the camera phone demographic,” pointed out Russell.