This comes in from Steve Smith: After the panel I moderated
yesterday on â¬oeMobilizing Video Advertising,⬠I am getting the
distinct feeling that the mobile carriers may have waited a bit too long to embrace an ad model. Tons of activity is going on even in the video space around them and through them via the mobile
Internet without any presence on the deck. Steven Burke of Versaly, whose company was among the first to put ad-supported video on a U.S. carrier deck says outright the carriers are just moving too
slow, and now their Fast Lane property is finding places off deck for distribution. Like MyWaves.com, an off-deck video portal that is on its way to its second million registered user, although CEO
Rajeev Raman admits that majority of users are still coming in internationally. Jonathan Cobb of Kiptronic made the excellent point that off-deck distribution is capable of harvesting incredible
amounts of user information for targeting even without having access to those legendary carrier databases of users. Â Now the argument is going to be over who owns that data when a company like
MyWaves redistributes content for companies like Versaly? More to the point, I am starting to wonder, who needs the carriers?
