Yospace could be described as the poster child for the mobile user-generated-content brigade. The company's video-sharing services for 3 (See Me TV) and O2 (Look At Me) have been hugely successful, while recently Yospace was bought by Emap as part of a strategy to work UGC around its magazine and radio brands. More of that later.
But as a firm that's been doing mobile video-sharing for a while now, Yospace has a good perspective on the implications of YouTube's mobile deal with Vodafone, which was announced last week. I asked Yospace CTO David Springall for his views at 3GSM.
"The trouble with the big internet players is they don't understand mobile very well," he says. "It's considered simply as a technical issue of getting content onto the phone, but it's far more than that. Also, these big guys have a different view on what the business model is for mobile, as opposed to the operators."
"Potentially, what's in YouTube's interests is very different to what's in Vodafone's interest. YouTube would love all the operators to be just pipes, whereas the operators want to own the whole service. There's an interesting friction there. We prefer to work with the operators without stepping on their feet unnecessarily."
It's true that See Me TV and Look At Me are clearly mobile services, focused on short video clips, and navigation that's suited to a mobile's small screen. Springall points out that users spend much less time browsing for content on something like See Me TV than they would on the full YouTube website. Naturally, this requires a different approach.
"Instant gratification is a really important thing with mobile," he says. "You need to get what you want from the service very quickly. We pre-moderate and vet the content before it goes up, and categorise it in a way that allows users to jump into a category, download a few clips and jump out again. Networking through tagging and things, as you would online, doesn't work on mobile due to the small screen, limited bandwidth and the cost you'd incur in downloading lots of clips."
Yospace's video-sharing services also have another major differentiator to the YouTubes of the online world: users pay to download the videos. It's small amounts, partly because it's user-generated content rather than 'premium' videos, and also to encourage a wide user base of downloaders. The people who originally uploaded the videos can then be paid a percentage of these revenues as a reward.
So is Emap's acquisition of Yospace another example of Big Media 'getting' the potential of user-generated content (you could also include News Corporation and MySpace, for example)? Springall says yes.
"The publishers need to embrace user-generated content rather than simply be scared by it, and Emap's move is a suggestion that they're embracing it rather than running away," he says. "UGC isn't a replacement for the traditional publishing model. It's an augmentation, allowing people to effectively express themselves."
In Emap's case, there's huge potential to build communities around, say, magazines like Heat and Q, or indeed any property that's got a particular interest or affinity. "Publishers have to embrace this, or they will lose out," he says.
3GSM is overwhelmingly a technology show, so what advances are going to drive mobile UGC in the future? Springall says certain developments can be taken for granted – better cameras, nicer screens and so on on mobile phones. He also cites voice-to-text technologies of the sort offered by SpinVox, which was showing off its voice blogging software at 3GSM this year.
"All these things will make the whole contribution and consumption process much easier," he says. "But the biggest thing is the creativity tools that people will have in their hand to produce great content. Look at Nokia announcing video-editing capabilities on their handsets. Right now, we're talking about 30-second video clips that you upload from our phone, but once you can start putting together five-minute videos, intercut and overdubbed with music or whatever, then it's going to change mobile AND the Web."
There's a problem though: operator restrictions and data charges. Your phone might be able to shoot a five-minute hi-res video, but how do you upload it to a UGC service if you don't want to transfer it to your PC first?
"There's no way an operator can allow you to get that off your phone reliably or cost-effectively," agrees Springall. "To get a 5MB video off your handset over the air might cost you £12 in data charges! The operators need to get on top of this. It needs to be addressed, but I'm sure it will be."