Vodafone to revamp Live!

ACCORDING TO an unnamed source close to the FT, Vodafone will enlist the help of music specialist, Musiwave, to pump up its Live! portal.

Musiwave - which is now part of Openwave - is, of course, already working for Vodafone and helped the mobile operator to win an industry award for its music download service last year [2005].

The most likely scenario is that Vodafone has grown jealous of 3 UK's ability to flog music from its portal. Indeed 3 UK has just claimed that it is second only to iTunes in online music sales.

And whose technology provides 3 Uk with its simultaneous music downloads to handsets and PCs? Musiwave's, of course.

However, Robert Shaw, Internet Strategy and Policy Advisor with the ITU's Strategy and Policy Unit, thinks the network operators might be chasing after Fool's Gold.

He pointed out that even a generous estimate has the likes of Holywood bringing in revenues of $45 billion a year whereas the telecoms operators enjoy revenues closer to $350 billion.

"I don't believe that content is King," Shaw told the INQ. "I'm not even sure it's a Prince".

Where the real money lies, Shaw believes is with encouraging third party providers to create innovative applications which run over the mobile networks like 3G.

He claims NTT DoCoMo's real success with i-mode wasn't so much to do with its browser technology (cHTML) but more to do with its billing mechanism which attracted thousands of third party providers. µ

L'INQ
Musiwave