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Content Delivery >> Mobile Rah!
12/29/2005
One aggregator of note is Summus, a Raleigh, NC vendor that burst onto the scene back in 2004. Within weeks of its debut, Summus had unveiled more than 200 fight songs and logos for download on a special Web site, www.fighttones.com. The company promoted these efforts by running newspaper ads on major college campuses, and by distributing posters, brochures, and other information in freshman dorms and at tailgate events. Today, CEO Gary Ban considers sports low-hanging fruit around which colleges can’t help but build additional revenue streams. Mobile content, he adds, provides the perfect opportunity to do just that.
“If I’m going to Carolina, I want to make sure I have the Carolina logo and Carolina fight song on my handset, because whether I’m a sports fan or not, I’m a Carolina fan because I go to the school,” Ban says. “This is the kind of thinking colleges must acknowledge with very basic and affordable services, because it’s a great way to make money.”
Smartphones may well be Summus’s biggest competitor. The company launched quietly in 2003, when the ring tone market was something of an amusement for analysts. Two years later, by summer 2005, Merrill’s Smartphones and Routman’s Collegiate Images announced groundbreaking licensing agreements with more than 30 leading colleges and universities in the US. These agreements gave Smartphones exclusive licensing rights to many of the country’s top schools, and marked the first time officially licensed college sports content was offered for download to mobile customers—a truly big deal.
Today, under these agreements, Smartphones creates officially licensed wallpapers, animated screensavers, mobile video clips, ring tones, text messaging campaigns, and mobile games. In addition, to constantly refresh content, the company has made a practice of sending its own photographers and video crews to games throughout the year. Smartphones artists use these new images to create designs that combine school logos with action plays to create content that’s entirely unique for some schools. In the next few weeks, Merrill says the company even hopes to send teams to campuses to record cheers and sell them as audio files.
“Let’s face it—a loyal fan is going to download more than just one thing,” he says. “However a student or alumnus chooses to personalize a phone, we hope to have something for everyone.” Summus and Smartphones specialize largely in still images and basic audio files; College Sports Television Networks, however, focuses on more dynamic stuff. The company, which also owns the popular U-WIRE college news service, has made a name for itself broadcasting college sporting events and other sports-related programming including live games, special events, news programs, and talk shows on a private cable network and over the Internet. Since September 2005, however, most of the network’s regular programs have been available for download to mobile devices through the private MobiTV service, and V-Cast from Verizon Wireless.
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