3GSM WORLD CONGRESS – BARCELONA. EuroNews announced the launch of its breaking news Mobile Video Alerts service in cooperation with Comsys. EuroNews is starting the service, which will feature breaking news videos, at the end of February in France, soon to be followed in other languages for the different European markets. The service in France will be reviewed and any feedback from users will be used to enhance the other European services. Mobile phones and converging media are extremely important for EuroNews; the channel aims to adapt to any possible medium for distribution so that viewers can watch any time, any where, and on any platform.
After subscribing to the services via an interactive voice response system (IVR) the subscribers receive a SMS with a link to the breaking video news. Users do not need to have a subscription via a specific operator portal, nor do they have to browse 5-7 clicks deep into a mobile portal menu structure they just have to activate the SMS-link and the video appears.
Philippe Cayla, Chairman and CEO of EuroNews, said: “Mobile Video Alerts are a logical step in the multi media evolution of EuroNews’ distribution strategy after distribution of our TV signal via satellite and cable reaching millions of Europeans and viewers worldwide on a daily basis, we have now successfully adapted to mobile distribution. Today more than 30 European mobile operators distribute EuroNews to mobile phones via their portals. We are now starting to distribute direct to consumer to increase our potential reach”.
Gerrit Jan Konijnenberg, CEO of Comsys and founder of the concept said: “This is a true multi-media set-up; combining fixed-line telephony (for subscription and micro-payments), SMS (for the wap-link delivery) and 3GPP encoded mobile video distributed combined in the various EuroNews TV languages and various news topics (general, economical, sports). This is a great example of converging technologies!”
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