For the last few months, our team here in Germany has been working on a new mobile service currently labelled "MyPC". The service enables Vodafone customers to get a variety of content streamed from their home PC to their mobile phone; pictures, music, videos and if you have a TV card, you can access a live TV stream direct to your mobile - timely, given that the World Cup kicks off here in Deutschland today ;-)
We have been working on this with very nice folks over at Orb for the last few months and the implementation is now available to Vodafone customers in Germany who have a UMTS (3G) phone and broadband connected home PC. To get the TV stream you will need a TV card from an outfit like Hauppage. The service is free of charge until the end of September, and you need to be on the Happy-Live tariff in order for the service to work (all Vodafone UMTS Live customers are automatically provisioned with Happy-Live).
MyPC works on most mobile handsets with a few notable exceptions; Motorola V3x, Motorola 1050, Motorola V980, Motorola C980, Samsung ZV10, Samsung ZV30, and the Samsung Z107. This is an aweseome service (yeah, im a bit biased) which demonstrates how mobile operators can leverage customers existing content assets. Its also a practical example of how the home environment can be mobilised, a topic that I expect will see significantly more activity in the coming months.
Press coverage in the Register and Engadget Mobile
5 comments:
Hi James,
I read your "biased" statement on the My PC service you just launched and realize that Vodafone has chosen a traditional 'Internetmodel' for a mobile environment by using browsers which had been developed for the standard Internet to access you own PC, where the browsing of large libraries of music or pictures is very difficult and sometimes unusable. If users have to push 25 clicks before getting anything on the phone their experiecne with this service will be very bad. I am still surprised why people have not learned from the past and continue to do the same mistakes over an over again. The industry has tried for the last 6 years to promote Browser based application on the handsets with WAP and other technologies and the overall marketfeedback has been loud and clear: The browsing on a phone with a standard Internet browser approach does not work!. The user experience is too cumbersome and the majority of the users will not use such cumbersome services repetedly.
Too bad Vodafone will have to go through this learning phase and loose out on a market advantage you could have developed.
Hi Anonymous,
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate your perspective and understand where you are coming from. However, in defense of our approach the service does have a degree of intelligence ensuring that the browser experience is optimised for the connecting device and the service flow is designed with minimum-click. Although this does have limitations, it does ensure that the service benefit is available to a significantly larger audience than it would be if we opted for an alternative delivery mechanism such as Java download. There is always a sensitive balance between addressable audience and user experience and the approach we have taken addresses this partial dichotomy.
Finally, with regard to your comment about browsing on a phone...take a look at the experience delivered by Opera Mini It's impressive!
Hi James,
I guess the market will decide if such an approach will eventually prevail. My experience is that a general technology will rarely satisfy all customers at the same time. Specific needs are better addressed with specific solutions. Teenagers that want to listen to music are not necessarily interested in looking at the TV while they are mobile. They would rather have an optimized interface for accessing their music then to have a global technology approach that can do everything but nothing really well. Your group might want to take a more segmented market approach and consider what individual users need.It is not the early adopter that will make this a successful service, you will need mainstream users to use this!
Today lots of people are interested in listening to music while mobile but not yet watching TV, video or Webcams. This might eventually be the case but today music is where the sweet spot is. People are using MP3 players to listen to music today; a wireless music service will have to provide a similar user experience than as listening to a MP3 player. A browser approach can not deliver functionalities similar to MP3 players. I have tried out your service and it took me 25 clicks to get the song I was looking for on my handset.Once the song is streamed I can not do anything else except stop it and use another 25 clicks to get another song. The access is slower, the search is harder, and functionalities such as shuffle play, fast forwarding and others can not be integrated in a browser. Hence VF might be able to address a larger end-user community by offering a general technology, but nobody will use the service on a recurring basis with such limitations. It is not about managing a dichotomy between browser versus Java approach but asking end-customer what they want instead of pushing yet another technology into the market. Providing users with a technology does not satisfy them. Me as a consumer, I made my choice, your service will not be useful to me!
I should probably have made it clearer that the Mein PC service is in Beta, so no-one is saying this is how customers must access music, tv or any other media, now or in the future. The Beta enables us to test the service with real customers, to understand usage, media access choice and so on. As for music itself, the demand is recognised and which is why there is a lot of product activity in this space. Vodafones product portoflio includes RadioDJ, full-track music downloads, vodafonemusic.com etc.
As for your "Mein PC" experience, I'm sorry you were disappointed but thank you for the feedback. We can use this and everyone elses ideas, comments and gripes to improve the service experience for all.
James,
this product rocks. add a flavor of flash based user interface and you are almost there... :-)
Yves.
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