An easy and intuitive way to access a mobile service is one of the most important pieces to become successful in the mobile space. ViiF – Germany’s first mobile video community – has found such a way. No software has to be installed on the mobile phone. No specific browser is required.
Videos are uploaded and downloaded with the video call functionality of the phone. This makes it incredibly easy to access the service even for folks that are not so technically savvy. The only prerequisites are that your mobile network operator (MNO) runs a video-call-enabled 3G network and that your phone supports those video calls. All German operators provide access to ViiF with rates between 0,39€ and 0,58€ per minute for recording and watching content. O2 currently provides free access, which makes the service especially interesting for O2 users.
After calling ViiF’s short code number from your mobile phone you are in a video call and can choose between recording a new and watching existing videos. Recorded videos can be saved in different folders to share publicly or only with friends.
Friends can be notified by SMS that a video has been recorded. Furthermore, it is possible to add ViiF to your blog with the ViiF Player and vblog your recordings to the blogosphere.
Besides streaming to and watching videos from your friends ViiF provides even more entertainment. They have contracts with MTV, ProSiebenSat.1-Group (large German TV stations) to push news, music, movie trailers and other additional content on your mobile.
Although ViiF is only available in Germany so far it is one of the first German websites that has a Facebook application. Facebook has not entered the German marked with a localized version yet but this is expected to happen in the next couple of weeks. Until today the Facebook-clone StudiVZ is the most active social network for college students in Germany. Facebook’s platform is way superior to the poorly copied StudiVZ website and I am expecting that most German students will turn their back to StudiVZ as soon as the language barrier drops. This makes ViiF’s Facebook Application a great move for the future.
ViiF is based in Berlin and has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital from Neuhaus Partners, VC Fonds Berlin and various business angels. They have even been nominated for (but didn’t win) the Mobile Monday Peer Award 2008.
ViiF is a great service but to make this a true success ViiF has to master the difficult task to get the mobile network operators to lower their prices or to provide the service for free as it happened with O2. If this is not possible another way has to be found on the long run to access ViiF. Unlimited mobile data plans are becoming cheaper in Germany and nobody will pay those prices per minute if other vblogging services can be accessed over the Mobile Web free of additional charge.
