Melodeo Inc. is teaming with Japanese developer Access China Inc. to tap the Chinese mobile music market.
The companies announced a joint venture to deliver music and other content through wireless operators and mobile media service providers. The first offering of full-track downloads is expected to be available by the end of the year, according to Stan Sorensen, Melodeo’s senior director of marketing.
“Our goal is to build out the platform,” Sorensen said, “then solidify deals with China Mobile and China Unicom,” the country’s two largest carriers. “There’s no letter of intent yet with either one of these two, but there have been a number of communications with them.”
The joint venture plans to build China’s first platform to deploy secure digital content through wireless carriers, the companies said. Melodeo will provide its proprietary digital rights management solution, dubbed MobilDRM, for the offering
Privately held Melodeo delivers mobile music to operators in Canada and Spain, and recently inked a deal to build a full-track mobile music download offering with VeriSign Inc. subsidiary Jamster. Access China is a subsidiary of Access Co., which develops mobile Web browsers and boasts more than 200 million deployments worldwide.
The effort could pay off substantially for Melodeo if it can secure carrier relationships. Not only does China offer more than 400 million mobile subscribers, the country is a hotbed of pirated digital content that Western content providers have long been wary of, Sorensen said.
“It’s most definitely more of a challenge” than other markets, he said. “But we’ve seen that China Access has a great record for maintaining (intellectual property) and keeping it where it belongs.”
