Mobile messaging company Vidiator Technology Inc. will announce its first big step into the mobile content market this week when it unveils a deal with noted comic book author Stan Lee.
Lee, the creator of noted Marvel comics characters Spider-Man, The Hulk and X-Men, will develop video clips and avatar applications based on creations from POW! Entertainment Inc., which he founded two years ago. The service, which is expected to come online with several wireless carriers worldwide during the next few months, initially will feature POW! characters such as The Drifter, The Accuser and Stripperella.
Vidiator, which provides transcoding and delivery of content within multimedia messaging service networks, has enabled live broadcasts of concerts, traffic conditions, sporting events and the “Big Brother” reality show over third-generation networks. The partnership will feature the use of Vidiator technologies such as VeeStream, a mobile streaming platform, and Vee3D, an interactive messaging platform featuring animated talking figures dubbed avatars.
The company said it approached Lee about taking his characters mobile, and the deal could establish a new business model for developing mobile content. While the first offerings will feature existing POW! characters, Lee will use the partnership to create content and characters exclusively for mobile, using the platform as a launching pad for other marketing opportunities.
“(Lee) wants to start from the mobile side first,” said Connie Wong, founder and chief executive officer of Vidiator’s U.S. operations. “He will develop new characters, new stories and applications exclusively for the mobile space.”
However, Lee’s most famous characters are spoken for. Mobile publisher Mforma announced a deal in November that granted rights to more than 5,000 Marvel characters, including Spider-Man and X-Men. The agreement covered movies, television, video games and comic books, giving Mforma an enormous reservoir of the comic giant’s content and a nearly endless stream of mass-marketing opportunities.
POW!, on the other hand, went public just last June and has struggled. Since opening at $2.10 per share in its market debut, the pink sheets stock has plummeted to 30 cents.
“This expansion into wireless was about as inevitable as it gets,” said Gill Champion, chief executive officer of POW! Entertainment. “We see the importance of this relationship with Vidiator establishing new POW! franchises on a global basis with interactive capabilities and capitalizing on an incredible delivery schedule.”
Lee’s characters are certain to set the new agreement apart from the Mforma deal as well. In contrast to more innocuous family-friendly superheroes, POW!’s portfolio includes Baad Alienz and Hef’s SuperBunnies, an elite crime-fighting team of former Playmates of the Month.
Like the Mforma deal, Vidiator’s agreement calls for a slew of entertainment applications, as well as the development of at least one mobile channel under the brand name “Stan Lee’s POW! Mobile.”
“With its animated graphics, images, and audio and visual functionality, streaming multimedia will revolutionize the way people experience content like games, news, concerts and text on their mobile phones,” said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. “Streaming broadband content, delivered wirelessly, will make the mobile phone even more indispensable than it is now.”
In addition to the traditional mobile fare, the new offerings will include comic-book style video installments for mobile handsets and interactive avatars that can automatically “lip synch” to downloaded audio files. Such applications are already in use in some Asian markets, said Wong, where avatars “read” news alerts or offer daily horoscopes.
“We’re also looking to create a series of greeting cards where you pick an avatar, then speak into your phone” to offer a birthday or holiday greeting, said Wong. “The system does the conversion, then downloads (the avatar), and now you can send it to your friends in your own voice.”
Because of network maturity issues, the new offerings will launch in Europe and Asia before North America, Wong said.
“In the U.S., we have to look at phone availability-how many phones can handle video,” she said. “We don’t want to launch if there’s only one or two (video-enabled) phones in the market. Operators want to launch when there are enough phones to create traffic.”
