paul smith's Snaps & Bytes e-home
April 2006: 3GSM Mobile Technology and Content show in Barcelona - A report.
The 3GSM World Conference was held in Barcelona from the 13-16th February this year. Touted as the world's largest event for the mobile/cellular phone industry, it offered ETO a chance to catch up on all that's new in the world of roaming adult entertainment, and tell you all about it. We sent Paul Smith to discover if it was more techno-fetishism than kinky sex and more 3&G than S&M.
Straight from a train ride into the city from the airport 7 miles away, I arrived at the event to be stunned by its scale. Not only the actual site, but also all the promotional material I'd passed to get there. It seems Spain's a country in love with the mobi. Every-other billboard I saw was advertising the trade-only event, and the ones that weren't were selling either a phone or a phone service. Movistar had spent some money, I can tell you.
Two giant towers framed the avenue and network of halls the show was being held in this year. Apparently a five year deal's been signed, guaranteeing the event will be held here until 2010 rather than returning to its previous older, smaller home in Cannes, which is good as I was told the show had doubled in size from 2005. To get inside I had to brush the shoulders and elbow the throats of the A to Z of the mobile business. Or, if the phone-directory-like show guide is to be believed, the 1 Ltd. to Zynetix Ltd. of the mobile business. A figure of 50,000 visitors and almost 1,000 exhibitors over the four days was banded about, and I can quite believe it. According to their website, www.3gsmwordcongress.com, visitors were paying several hundred Euros each to be there. Rarely have I been more pleased to slip in the Press Registration door, clutching an ETO and some ID.
My first day at the show was slightly marred by having my debit card frozen by my bank because, and I quote, 'Someone had tried to use it in Spain'. "Yes," I said, shortly before I ran out of phone credit while trying to sort things out with Abbey Customer Disservices, "ME!!" So I spent a day without money, food, communications or any way of paying for a room for the night. Which was a bit of a worry, as I'd not brought a coat to sleep rough in. 'Quite an adventure'.
While not walking the streets to find the British Consulate (they close at 2pm, by the way) I found the Adult Content Zone slightly ghettoised on the (UK) first floor of Hall2, in amongst all the other content exhibitors. I was surprised how small this red-carpeted area was, given that without content the other 95% of the show was demo'ing technology that'd basically let you talk to other people with your mobile phone. And they've been doing that since the 80's. Furthermore, of the several-dozen stands in the content zone, only perhaps one in eight appeared to be promoting adult content. This seemed strange to me as I'd heard 40% of premium phone services, of whatever type, are erotic or pornographic in nature. Perhaps they were just being shy?
Waat Media were a standout exhibitor, sporting a big stand with plasma screens displaying a show-reel of soft material that told me there's nothing shy about these guys. I spoke to Ian Aaron about why they were at the show and what they do. After confirming the firm's name is pronounced 'What', the young Jeff Goldblum (approx. The Tall Guy era) look-and-sound-alike CEO told me: "What we've been doing for the last five years is help operators in twenty eight countries now, to get into the erotic business responsibly. So we built a whole ratings system around a code of practice to establish thirty explicitness levels for any content - Our Wireless Content Standards Rating Matrix. That way carrier-by-carrier can choose, by market, social and regional preference, what they carry. By giving them the tools to control content they can be comfortable with that content and how it's validated. We have exclusive deals with Vivid, Girls gone Wild and Playgirl, among many others. So our strategy is to promote strong brands, with traffic driving affiliates. We're at 3GSM as this is the key show for us, and it's 2006 when things have really broken through for us. Relationships have been built and we've worked hard to get people excited and now it's happening. We're talking about our thirteen proper, 24/7 mobile TV-channels -Vivid, Playboy and Private-mobile, softer brands like Blue, as well as new payment models for those. Full-motion video chat… We have a lot of great news for this show. It's been a phenomenal few days for us as Waat's usually behind the scenes. So when you see Vivid in Forbes magazine, and carriers talking about services, it's our global delivery strategy they're really talking about, as well as the media. It helps to legitimise the industry. We're not doing this in the US as Europe's the leader in this industry, although we do have a national campaign to go live in the States soon. Actually, we're opening a London office on The Strand in March. Latin America and Asia are both ahead of the States so we're looking to them too."
The star of the show, for me, was Andreas Adami on the Princess Productions stand. He overheard my chat with my bank and offered to loan me €100 to make sure I got a bed for the night, even though I'd made a mess of pronouncing his name. I was touched that a total stranger would be that trusting and generous-of-spirit. Happily my financial dramas had been resolved by the time I found a hotel with a spare room at 8pm, so I was able to hand the bills back the following day. Andreas, from Italy, was attending the show looking for someone to pick up his Sexy Football Girls product. Essentially the marriage of those three great male spherical interests; Soccer and Breasts. He needed to get a deal closed quickly as the World Cup will soon be upon us, but felt happy that he'd spoken to some good prospects at the show. "This isn't an event where we expect to sign a deal, but everyone who is anyone is here, so we've seen all the right people."
My Thursday at the show was much better. For a start, it was quieter so exhibitors had more time to chat and show me what they were promoting. I'd also had a good breakfast so I had the strength to carry my over-stuffed weekend bag around.
I met the former Director of Research of the National Film and Television School in Beconsfield, Anthropics' CEO Andrew Berend. He was at the show with Chief Scientist (great title!) Tony Polichroniadis (great name!) promoting some cunning software that takes video of a model and adds animation to it, called GlamourChat. This, coupled with some clever AI that takes texts to the 'virtual girlfriend' (conversation turned to the film Weird Science at this point) and has her reply with video messages including convincing synthesised speech and lip-syncing, makes an interactive service which doesn't require a girl in Prague to be available 24-hours-a-day. I tried to show off by mentioning the Turing Test, where talking to a sophisticated AI programme, you're convinced it's a person. But no one batted an eyelid. Anthropics' system is the same idea with a narrower, adult scope. I guess if you ask the Talking Head (and toned thighs) what she thinks of the war in Iraq she plays the 'I'm just a simple girl/blonde' card. Good to see Brits at the cutting edge of some very promising 'low-cost-of-delivery' technology.
Mobstar Media are another such firm, hailing from Brighton. They're an animation production company specialise in making mobile-friendly animated shorts, featuring the likes of Wank Boy, saving the Earth through the medium of masturbation and Angry Nun, who the people behind The Crazy Frog had taken a shine to, apparently. Their Jamie Goldblatt told me, "It's Benny Hill for the 21st Century. Our colourful characters bring a lot of fun to a phone. We have TrannyFormers - Fellas in Disguise, Captain Kock and When Wee Folk Attack." Which features the only giant midgets I've ever seen. Mobstar's 'Extreme Tourettes' series is weekly episodes of mobile mayhem. Their products reminded me of the best of Viz being naughty, so nothing bad there. They also have live-action 'Naked Stand-up Show', showing they have a great knack for getting pretty topless girls to deliver a punch line beautifully. Never an easy thing.
Private had a double-sized stand at the end of one row. I'd missed Sophie Evans on Wednesday while playing call-centre hide-and-seek, which was a shame, but I grabbed a couple of minutes with Niklas Nordquist of Lechill instead. He was slightly bleary eyed after a Private party at the Elephant Club the night before, but I didn't let that stop me savaging him like a rabid Paxman in a "Did you threaten to overrule him?" style:
"For the last couple of years we've taken all Private's 40-years of content and taken it wireless- made it available to a mobile audience. So pictures, galleries, video downloads, mobile TV, sorted to work with all models of phones and all operators, depending on appropriate content for them, in whichever country. It's a lot of subdivision, which is where an aggregator like Lechill can succeed, because Private don't have the time, resources or experience to do it. I'm here to talk to operators who want to make use of the Private brand and their material. There's a big buzz about mobile-TV here because it's the next level. As 3G spreads to eastern European countries it's opening up a huge new market so that's our next challenge - to deliver good full-motion TV content to the small screen, with the right sort of streaming. We focus in Europe as the phone networks here are very advanced, technically, and the people are more open to adult content. While our licenses are worldwide, in the US we run into problems. Both on a technical front and because the operators' mentality is 'we don't want this', even though the consumer does. It'll find its way there somehow as the USA is probably the biggest adult product consuming country in the world. The question is how. Asia has some of the same problems, which we can work around by looking at the softer end of the content spectrum for them."
He laughed, "With the Private material, it's not so easy to make it soft, but because of what operators are asking for, Private are now shooting stuff specifically for mobile TV- like a tasteful strip. It's funny, the same operator in one country may have very different rules about what they'll carry compared to the same firm in another country. Mobile age verification is core to moving forward and gaining acceptance globally."
Mark Watts, Operations Director of Activefone in Peterborough had arranged to meet me at the show and I found him in a busy restaurant in a courtyard between halls. Over a coffee he had this to say about the industry and the show. "We call mobile the fourth screen. There was cinema, then TV. Then PCs and now handheld interconnected media devices - Phones! I've been in mobile content for twelve years and we've gone down the media platform route, which fits very well with adult. Our erotic version is called Q46 and we use Bango for revenue collection, as it's so much more flexible than SMS or whatever. Adult's not a clear market for people in mobile. I mean, what does the consumer actually want? How do they know what film with which star's coming out and if it's set to do well? It's not mobile people's market, basically. I'm friendly with Tim at ABS so I've been talking to him about what these new technologies can do for adult distribution. Whether that's UK amateur, glossy US or whatever. The mobile world's where the Internet was ten years ago and it's by realising how that's panned out that we can look at revenue share deals and brand appeal and how brand integrity is kept. There's also the question of how download numbers are reported to manufacturers -studios, to look at, as they have no channel control once they put their material in the hands of an aggregator. It's usually a trust relationship that is open to abuse. Thanks to our ad in ETO in February we've been in contact with loads of people who have exclusive content who are looking to make exclusive deals. What makes us special is they control our platform. Whatever price point they set, that's the price to access that file, stream, gallery, with full online stats so they can see, in real-time, what's happening with their product. Because it's not limited to a £1.50 short-code plus product code text system, they can price something from 1p to £99. And there's no issues over WAP settings, or 'my handset won't work with what I just paid money to see' things, because to see Bango you have to be browsing with WAP already, and our header-recognition system always ensures you're sent data in a format your particular handset can handle. So we're here at 3GSM to launch our Cherry Mobile adult brand and a bundled deal of content assets from our platform, including Harmony and Vivid, for third party distribution. Busy times for us! We're also seeing how the adult market is responding to the technology by filming with mobiles in mind. We need 30 and 90 second and half-hour clips. The longer ones are fine, but films made for 30 or 90 seconds have to be edited very carefully to give you the classic 'warm-up, action, climax' arc, especially if they're to fit in a genre without jumping about. The new phones coming out will drive this market. Big colour screens, better 'MP3' friendly audio, Wi-Fi and giant storage -I have a two-Gig card in this one- mean you really do have all you need to see quality films or TV anywhere. This has been a very good show for us, on both adult and non-adult sides of the business, even though there were hour-long queues for coffee yesterday. We've been building our business for a year and it's gone berserk in the last few weeks. It's very satisfying to see the return on all our hard work as well as a vindication of our approach to the market. Our platform's even been nominated for a Mobile News phone industry award."
MP Media's Jana Soukupová from the Czech Republic was happy to talk me through their range of solutions for adult streaming and downloads, supported by over 500 different handsets. So that's Java video clips, white-label web and WAP sites and specially designed portals, a hosting and delivery platform, Realplayer, MPEG-4, 3GP and windows media streaming… "By working directly with operators (by which she means O2, Orange, etc.)… -my digital recorder breaks up as her phone dials out- …premium rate number, credit card, or whatever. He receives one 'push', downloads the 30Kb Java application and then the content is streamed live to him. In the menu you can pick from web-cam streams from our girls in Prague and chat with them via SMS message, which can also be a premium-rate revenue source. The models respond to instructions. The other option is to watch streams of 3,000 pre-recorded gay and straight videos in thirteen languages that are hosted on our servers. These are replaced after twelve hours so there's always fresh content to bring people back. There are hard and soft versions of these, but not of the live chat as that always turns hardcore.
"Oh yes", I said, suddenly embarrassed by what I saw on the little screen. "I have the same duvet cover."
The Mooobile/Mobile Babes stand was two-in-one I wanted to visit, having heard about Mooobile's live 2-way adult video chat portal. It's a peep show on your phone, basically, with the added twist that the girl (or guy, as there's a gay version of the service) can see you waving -or similar- at the other end of the line. This £2.50 per minute 3G-only service was demo'ed for me by Marc Jarrett of Mooobile, and a dark haired lady in Brazil. Using video short codes, this was as easy as placing any video call and I was very impressed by its potential. When I asked for a photo of him on the stand he, like many others, said they preferred to stay in the background, and that the product is the star of their show. Martijn Broersma of Mobile Babes, who deal with 25 operators in 16 countries, out performing some much bigger names, was as shocked as I at the lack of adult content exhibitors at the show: "Where is Cherry Sauce? Where's Playboy? But it's been good for us as we've seen some new operators walking around."
At the W Content stand I met CEO Andy Kleitsch from America, who'd just had his laptop pinched. So he couldn't demo what Wireless Content Solutions they offer in the way of mobile video, but he did talk me through some names they handle, including cousin Stevie, who's a name I recognised. One choice fact I picked up is US operators have basically the same content guidelines as those in communist China. He said that the 3GSM show was a traditional telecoms show which had developed to include content and that he felt he'd made the couple of good contacts that were all he needed to call the event a success for him. He also introduced me to Taz Shariff of Terrapinn who runs the Mobile Content World show at Earls Court every September.
Maria of Sex Navigator had been kept very busy but I caught five minutes with her. "Our portal has different products like video, porno-pack - which is multi media, like a story, some pictures and then a video clip. Then we have animations, galleries, so on. We grade our content to four levels: erotic but no nudity, topless, hardcore and gay. At this show we're promoting streaming videos and live shows and downloads. Operators are interested as they make money from the connection, of course."
At this point the network collapsed. Hardly surprising as I never saw anyone not talking on their phone or using one for a demonstration and the local hubs must have been overwhelmed quite regularly, since they're designed for the usual traffic of the area. Unable to show me what she was talking about, Maria told me this was her fourth 3GSM World Congress. When the connection came back, the performer had nipped to the loo but I got the general idea. She continued, "For now it's a one-way show, but we will be having two-way video soon. 3GSM has been a good show for us, as the operators we've been seeing every year are coming around to adult content and getting more familiar with the brands in this market."
Mobibase are a content provider, focusing on lingerie and bikini pictures (about 30% of their portfolio is 'adult') but dealing in harder material too. I chatted for a while with the lady on the stand, but it was 3.30pm by now, and I could tell people wanted to go home. The show'd been on from 9am to 7pm on Monday to Wednesday but Thursday they were due to close at 5pm. However it was still fairly busy when I eventually left, having taken a final tour with my camera out at 5.20.
I had a good time at the show, even though every time I produced my Nokia 3310 people laughed so hard they couldn't hear me protest that it's a design classic. Sadly I can't say I learned an awful lot about what's up-and-coming in the adult-specific world but I do now know what an aggregator does (essentially a dealer in mobile content), and why HSDPA is what 3G should have been (High Speed Data Packet Access: It's all about data-rates up to 600Kb/s, making it ideal for small-screen high-frame-rate video. Some people call it '3.5G'). I also learned one in six cellular phones runs on WinMobile and Microsoft are gearing up to make mobile services much more 'Internet-like'. Expect to see more mobile blogs, mobi-radio stations (where wireless meets The Wireless) and Yahoo!Go making sense of it all in the near future.
The next 3GSM Global Convention (might be the 4GSM event before long) will also be held at the same venue, Fira Barcelona, Montjuic, from the 12th to the 15th of February 2007. Book early to avoid disappointment. And bring some cash! See elsewhere in this issue what I spent my other two days in Barcelona doing.
Paul Smith is still free to a good home. Kinky Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please.