See Me TV: Wow!
I missed this last week, but I find this new service from Hutchinson's 3UK called See Me TV incredibly interesting:
See Me TV is set to become the ultimate reality channel - providing an opportunity for 3 customers to shine in front a potential audience of millions.
All the budding star has to do is submit a thirty second video clip to the service displaying their talents in front of or behind the camera. The clip will then be uploaded to the 'See Me TV' channel for other 3 customers to view*.
Each time a clip is downloaded by a 3 customer the performer gets paid 1p. With a potential audience of 3.2 million, the most popular clips from contributors could make thousands of pounds worth of cash.
Credits from downloads are accumulated in an account and then a transfer made via Paypal - with no cap on what a 3 customer can earn from See Me TV.
I think this is pretty amazing. God knows how much they're charging the viewer for the clips - probably a lot more than the meager 1p they're sharing back to the creator... But it's just the fact that Three is basically doing a rev-share for user-generated content that blows my mind. Not a lot, but if you happen to have a hit video seen by a decent percentage of Three's 3 million UK subscribers, you could make some money!
It could be the beginning of a whole new revenue stream for the mobile industry based on multimedia microcontent. Think about it. This isn't a mobile operator playing broker between merchant and consumer (like DoCoMo has famously done), but instead playing broker between the consumers themselves. It's got an eBay or AdSense like quality to it, no? Who'd have thunk the Wall Gardeners would be the company to do this?
Speaking of eBay, I have to wonder why they're bothering with PayPal, though. Why not just deposit your earnings back into your account? Maybe because of all the pre-paid accounts out there? Maybe because Three doesn't want to become essentially a bank (by holding your earnings in case you earn more than you owe)? Very strange to me.
Regardless, I think it's brilliant. What do you think?
-Russ