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Orange demonstrating that consumers will watch Mobile TV and IPTV versions of same content Orange has undertaken a strategy of cross-platform integration, which is reflected in a unified brand. Steve Hawley reports
France Telecom has unified its communications services under the Orange brand (see News in Brief item, page four). Although many companies do this for disparate products for marketing bundles, Orange is quickly moving to truly integrate its IPTV (formerly MaLigne TV), Internet (formerly Wanadoo) and mobile telephone (formerly Orange) offerings.Herve Payan, senior vice president of partnerships and services for Orange, says that unifying the services spells a clear benefit for subscribers: portability of content. As a subscriber uses the system, the option exists to establish preferences. So when a fixed-line subscriber uses the mobile device, the preferences travel with the device. Plus Bell La Vie, a video series produced by Orange, is available to high-speed PDA, PC users, Mobile and IPTV users. Orange has found that consumers will watch the two-minute short-form version on a mobile phone, then watch the 23 minute long-form version on its IPTV service. They found that out of the 1.5 million mobile subscribers that watch the short-form, about half a million of them also watch the long version. Pricing for the content is EUR1 on a PC, free on a mobile phone (but the user pays for airtime) and is also offered free on the IPTV service as an incentive. The approach also benefits Orange because it can use one platform to drive people to adopt others across the portfolio. Mr. Payan said early results show that the content revolution isn’t really about “convergence” but about a diversity of terminals, networks and usages. |
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