@CTIA: Interview With Frank Barbieri, President Of Viva Vision, On Hispanic Mobile Video

(c) MocoNews by James Pearce

I met up with Frank Barbieri, president of Viva Vision, to discuss Viva Vision's plans for expansion into the North American market, as well as into Latin America. The company was recently bought by new investors, who saw the benefit of the company's technology and rebranded it from Inetcam to Viva Vision and hired Frank to run it and install new management.

Frank said that Viva Vision had a leadership position in the region but fluffed the advantage, although he's now ready to compete with new entrants like MobiTV and Inmobia. He's gone on a hiring spree to help with that, saying that he'd lured Nick Montes from AG to be VP and General Manager Latin America, Justin Stockton from Virgin Mobile, and Fred Clarke from Infospace.

On the content side Viva Vision aims to offer a mixture of commercial content and user generated content, but what he called "user gen plus" which is more like independent producers, being people who are putting in a serious effort. Whereas typical user generated content such as you find on YouTube may have a lot of IP issues, Frank reckons that by dealing with independent producers that live in a community or scene and is passionate about it you get better content that is "rights cleared", and therefore easier to generate revenue with.

Viva Vision is currently on 15 carriers in the region (all the Movistar carriers and Alltel) and the plan is to spend the next six months trying to expand in the US market, although Viva Vision also wants to capture the southern cone of Latin America and push into Brazil -- which has some marked differences from the rest of the region.

"The markets that we're in are very very hungry for it," said Barbieri. "In markets like Puerto Rico and Venezuela, we are seeing way above average conversion rates. The typical mobile TV conversion rate that's batted around is 1%, we're seeing more than double that in some markets. So I think there is a lot of pent up demand. And I think it has to do with the fact that PC penetration is lower. So you have a population whose primary connection device is the mobile phone."

There is a high percentage of low-end handsets on low-end networks in the region, which Viva Vision addresses with a proprietary codec, which helps them "reach a broader audience than the carriers thought was possible with video". The higher-end handsets are served with MPEG4.
"A lot of our customers are post paid, which means we have to managed churn more tightly," said Frank. "We need to offer a quality product."

Viva Vision has some commercial content and some user generated, although a lot of the user generated stuff is more along the lines of independent movie producers. Still, it plans to launch a new channel next month called Torq TV, which will offer the sort of home video content that was made popular by "Funniest Home Video" shows.

There are also plans for advertising, although Frank steers more towards "brand engagement" than interstitial video advertising. "When you think of entertainment as an interactive experience, brands want to be associated with that...Brands want to be associated with kids discovering the next big thing. And in Latin America this is the device they're going to do it with." He pointed out that with Java and Brew you could create a direct response channel for the promotions. He called this "participatory video".

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