OXFORD, United Kingdom—A joint venture between Orange and U.K.-based cable operator NTL should soon enable Orange cell-phone users to order digital content and have it downloaded via NTL’s broadband connection to their homes. NTL said it is also planning to leverage its relationships with its content providers to provide a range of exclusive mobile content to subscribers of the new service.
The joint venture with NTL Mobile, which was agreed to 12 months ago with the aim to share services and boost each company’s customer base, is attempting to integrate the companies’ respective mobile and fixed broadband delivery platforms to enable streamlining m-commerce services.
“Eventually you will see a series of bundled propositions that are aimed at different segments of the market,” said Richard Miller, NTL’s mobile product marketing manager. “We want to move quickly, but there are a number of technical difficulties involved in combining a mobile and a fixed platform into a single proposition.”
To date, the only joint services available through NTL Mobile are largely based on Orange’s existing short message service (SMS) and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) services.
