Vodafone will invest E1.6 billion in its mPortal Vizzavi, a joint venture with Vivendi.
Mobile giant Vodafone today outlined future plans for its mPortal, Vizzavi, a joint venture with Vivendi Universal. It will invest E1.6 billion in the venture by the end of 2002 and expects it to break even by the end of 2003. This is later than hoped, mainly due to a lack of higher-bandwidth handsets.
Even though Vodafone’s network is ready for higher-bandwidth GRPS services, Motorola is the only company with handsets commercially available; the largest manufacturer, Nokia, isn’t going to produce any GPRS handsets until Q3 this year. Vodafone believes that launching a GPRS service with the current limited volumes will be unviable.
Rollout delays will be a problem for mPortals. At the moment, they are restricted to offering basic, text-based services, since the current version of WAP running on GSM devices barely supports multimedia content. This is a particular problem since content provider Vivendi is strongest in music, TV and film. Still, Vizzavi is the default mPortal for all Vodafone devices – and since current generation mobile handsets are hard to reconfigure to access external sites, this will give it a major advantage for now.
As GPRS comes online later this year and expands in 2002, followed by 3G devices from 2003 onwards, the story will change. As well as supporting higher-bandwidth functions, the new devices will be much easier to use and therefore to access independent sites from. Datamonitor predicts 56% of mPortal revenues will come from sites not affiliated with mobile operators by 2003. Instead of operator access, content will be key.
But as long as Vodafone and Vivendi can successfully repackage their content in a mobile-friendly format, the portal should still do well. By 2005, entertainment will be the largest revenue segment from mobile devices, with 36% of total revenues (over $10 billion). Vivendi is second only to AOL Time Warner in entertainment. The user base Vizzavi attracts through its Vodafone link may well stay thanks to Vivendi’s content.
