Video E-Mail And The In-box
Video Mail On Main Street
There are several exceptions to the video mail rule. Every day, at approximately 7:50 AM in any time zone in North America, Elmo, the friendly blue character on Sesame Street, receives a video mail from one of his friends. While Sesame Street is not physically connected to "Main St," when the current viewers of Sesame Street reach the age when they are able to make decisions about video mail, the technology will certainly be at their disposal and they could make it commonplace. But perhaps we won’t need to wait 10 or 15 years.
Turn on the television in T-Mobile’s continental US markets, any time of the day and you are likely to see a commercial portraying a young man hopping around in a pet shop while a spiny hedge hog climbs up his pant leg. The recipients of video mail, presumably the parents of the service subscriber, understand immediately that the gentleman is no longer a strong marriage candidate. Sponsored by the wireless telephony service provider, T-Mobile USA, these spots illustrate personal video messaging to consumers. T-Mobile is selling a Nokia 3650 color videophone for $299, and customers who then subscribe to a $2.99/month service (above their voice messaging subscription fees) can transmit data, photos and up to 10 seconds of compressed video to any Internet e-mail address.
The T-Mobile solution, like most other solutions on the market (past and present), creates a file which is attached to an e-mail. Once entirely downloaded by the e-mail client and residing on the local hard disk, the file can be opened in a proprietary viewing application.
In fact, these simulations of successful video mail usage are supported by commercial services and actual documented experiences. In Japan, where cellular phone use is widespread and the service options richer than in other geographies, the concept of video mail is catching on. For instance, J-Phone Co., Ltd. announced late last year that as of November 19, 2002 the number of subscribers to its video messaging service known as "Movie Sha-mail" passed the 1 million mark. J-Phone reached the milestone approximately 9 months after first introducing the service in March 2002. Within a week of this announcement, @nifty, the largest ISP in Japan, which is wholly owned by FUJITSU, announced that it would be private labeling TalkWay Communications’ technology and offering a commercial video e-mail service called Douga Mail, in Japan.
Aside from the above services for personal video mail applications, there are also instances of the successful use of video for enhancing enterprise to consumer messaging. Music publishing and music distribution giant BMG has proven the financial benefit of video mail for marketing the latest Dave Matthews Band album. Using Avalon’s rich media digital marketing platform, BMG sent a sample of music and some behind the scenes video footage in an e-mail along with a direct response mechanism directly inside the body of the HTML-formatted message. The video rich e-mail was sent out to 650,000 fans and the results exceed industry norms. Over 5,000 people pre-purchased the title from their on-line retailer in the first week of the campaign.
"One of the keys to the success of BMG’s campaign," says Jay Stevens, VP of Marketing of Avalon, "is that they didn’t just repurpose a made-for-television experience and try to fit that into a smaller PC window. Instead, the content was specifically created to appeal to the fans of the band." Narrow casting, a concept introduced with webcasting as an alternative to mass communications, is reaching its potential with technologies such as video mail.
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