Feature

3 offers free video downloads from April

This week 3 announced they are the first to offer their customers free video streams based against advertising from April on the same week Nokia announce they’re to provide advertisers access to their customers.
 
Microsoft and Unilever are reportedly the first advertisers interested in supporting 3’s new free video offering where advertising content will be tailored to the users profile.

Rhythm NewMedia, who will power the new system, is handling all aspects of the service, from the selling of space to the delivery of the ads. CEO Ujjal Kohli said: "We believe this is the world's first ad-supported, individually targeted mobile video service."

Ujjal is apparently doing the rounds with other mobile networks so 3 may not hold the exclusivity for long.

This at the same time that Nokia announce the Nokia Ad Service & Nokia Advertising Connector. It looks like another ambitious move into the ‘services’ market from a company that used to just make handsets.

Nokia has already announced various schemes to sell mobile music (having bought music provider Loudeye) and is expected to do the same in gaming as part of its re-launch of the N-Gage platform.

The two ad launches move Nokia into an extremely hot mobile sector, populated at present by pureplays such as Screentonic and Admob, as well as web giants like Yahoo.

Nokia Ad Service is a fully managed service aimed at the advertising community, which provides ‘planning, deploying, optimising and reporting’ for client campaigns. It supports interactive content such as banner ads in browsing services, ads embedded in applications and videos. The launch is scheduled imminently in Europe and globally in the second half of 2007.

Nokia Advertising Connector helps partners serve the right ads to the right devices. It acts as an ‘intelligent switch’ selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads depending on the user’s context. As such ads will be closely tied to specific applications, such as watching mobile TV, listening to music or looking at maps. Nokia Advertising Connector supports the CPA (cost per action) model.  
 
The service will run several pilots during the coming months and is planned to become commercially available by the end of 2007.