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AT&T Wireless, in cooperation with NBC, provided a mobile information service during the Olympic games in Athens, which included videos and news. The service was powered by the mLogic content-management platform from Crisp Wireless.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The Crisp Wireless content-management platform helped AT&T Wireless and NBC provide mobile services such as video highlights from the Olympics.
AT&T Wireless provided the service exclusively to its subscribers through NBC's Olympics.com mobile application, a complement to the company's Olympics.com internet website. As a sponsor of the US Olympics team, AT&T Wireless was allowed to access NBC's content from Athens.
A wide range of Olympic content was available to AT&T users, such as event results and schedules, broadcast schedules, athlete diaries and biographies, country profiles and medal counts.
Andy Sullivan, vice president for client services at Crisp Wireless, says: "During the 17 days of the Olympic games, more than 1 million people used the service, which was free of charge. In the same period there were hundreds of thousands of user-requested alert messages sent to those people.
"This was an appetizer for AT&T's customers to make them get over the learning curve, and it drove a lot of traffic."
Fantasy game
More exciting features included Fantasy Olympic Games, where users could compete with each other in a fantasy game to earn as many medals as possible, and Olympic Videos, with video highlights, athlete interviews, promotional videos and Olympic trials highlights.
"Users could also set up WAP push alerts of their own choice to have links to certain content sent to their mobile phones, such as news about a specific country or the top headlines," Sullivan says. "When medals were awarded, users could subscribe to receive alerts as soon the champions were known for their favorite sport or country.
"The service was run on AT&T's UMTS high-speed network and the quality was excellent. The video quality was also very high, almost as high as for fixed downloaded video. I think the downloading of material will grow in importance in the future, but at the moment we are targeting streaming video clips of one to five minutes."
Flexible billing mechanisms
The engine behind all these applications was Crisp Wireless' mLogic Media 3G product, a server-based software application that manages content, application flow and transcoding (re-formatting of text, images and so on for various wireless devices). The system also has a user interface, incorporates flexible billing mechanisms that let content providers charge for delivery of content, and integrates a sophisticated database for management of multimedia content at third-party servers.
"Our solution re-formats and optimizes all types of content and provides it to all kinds of mobile devices, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets," Sullivan says. "It can handle Java, Brew, Symbian, WAP and other less-common device technologies such as Flash for mobile. Content providers can use the existing carrier billing infrastructure for billing on behalf of others or they can use their own systems. Another option is to use a third-party billing system and directly charge the consumer via credit card or other payment method."
Crisp Wireless is a US mobile software company that provides advanced mobile content-management solutions for consumer-targeting enterprises. Its customers include such companies as BMG, NBC, BeMusic, Overstock, the US Olympic Team and AT&T Wireless. The company is based in New York and plans to establish itself in Europe. Crisp Wireless has been a member of Ericsson Mobility World since 2001.
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