The digital age has changed everything we’ve known in traditional media, how it’s distributed, but most importantly, how it’s consumed.
The world is still surging in a sort of Technology Renaissance where innovation is taking off, long standing habits are changing, and media is becoming as consumable as our snacking habits, bit by bit, on the go as much as we are.
One such company that is ahead of the curve is Yukoono, a digital content portal that is as adaptable as the user is.
Sales Director of Yukoono, Thomsen Ghebresellassie states that “The idea of Yukoono came up last year in April when the CEO thought about why a user should only have access to certain types of content and certain type of media? If you are browsing on the website, you have to visit several websites in order to get news, videos on YouTube, or a different application in order to get access to content. So we came up with the idea of having one platform which you can think of a big shopping mall.”
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| Thomsen Ghebresellassie |
A shopping mall of sorts is what Yukoono became. The application stands as a global portal with access to all content due to partnerships based on shared distribution. Each of these “stores in the mall” are called channels and partners offer up their content to be accessible via these channels increasing exposure, visibility, and consumption of what they are creating.
As sales director for Yukoono, the task of global responsibility for product placement and sales teams is a daunting task, but Thomsen relies on his years of experience in the music industry to help him build Yukoono’s reputation as a recognizable brand familiar to all.
The Platform Explained
The very beneficial thing about this platform is that Yukoono guarantees the user a convergence of mobile app and TV. If you’re watching a movie on your handset while you’re traveling, come back home, you turn on your TV or your laptop, you log in and you can watch the movie where you just stopped, it’s bookmarked.
This is a simple explanation about the benefits of the platform. The concept was to create an information entertainment platform which you can access from different platforms – mobile, web and TV (3 screens).
Due to the fact that we are now living in an area where mobile content is extremely necessary and more popular, people are using their iPhones, for example, to access even more applications online.
“Facebook for example, the social community, everyone is updating their status via mobile phone. It’s just a matter of time where there’s also access to different video on demand platforms where they can watch movies. As you can see, in the Asian market so far the user is far far away from where we are right now, we’re just in the [infant] stage, Thomsen says of those consuming digital content.
Interestingly, it’s been shown that the user right now in the Asian market is spending two and a half hours a day watching movies and its content on his mobile. Thomsen is very correct when we look at how certain cultures, such as our Asian counterparts, expect to consume their media.
The mobile industry, the mobile internet is getting more and more important for delivering, accessing news and information for the user.
Yukoono Has Focus
“I believe that everyone is focusing on the iPhone right now. It is one of the most popular handsets on the market right now but if you see the coverage from a global base, iPhone is just one out of two and a half thousand handsets worldwide. So the focus on our platform is not the iPhone, its nice to have, but we are attempting to provide service to more regular handsets on the market,” asserts Thomsen.
It’s a known fact that the iPhone has dominated much of the Western world in terms of usage and infiltration into our culture, but worldwide, there are many more phones to take advantage of. Developing a mobile platform is very expensive and not something that every mobile platform company is willing to spend the time and resources to build out.
This is where Yukoono steps in as the aggregation and accessibility across all three screens. It’s a process that is simplified for all the labels, especially for the publishers.
Quality Encourages People to Move
Recently at IFA Berlin, this past September, big TV manufacturers were displaying their new screens, unique platforms all connecting to services such as YouTube, Twitter, and other social network platforms. Thomsen shares that a big question at the event was “Why don’t you link?” He admits it’s a fair question, but the answer is equally simple.
“It’s a simple fact that if you link to different websites that means you don’t have any influence about the quality of the content. As you know on YouTube where a user generated content has to be uploaded, quality cannot be guaranteed. You don’t have any influence on that and we want to guarantee 100% HD quality for our users. The second is thinking on TV platform, not only are the younger users using it to watch TV, but also the older generation. So if you link to different websites that means that the user has to adjust himself all the time to the navigation structure of these different platforms and this is going to be quite difficult.”
That’s why Yukoono worked hard to have one surface in all different platforms so no matter where the user logs in, it all is set up you can browse through all the different platforms and it’s guaranteed to all be the same.
“I cannot believe that five years ago that you had to be sitting on the laptop or even writing and sending letters by hand. The communication is getting shorter and shorter and it has to be more quicker and faster and as you can see there are a lot of online platforms, storage especially where you don’t have to keep things on your laptop anymore or on your mobile device. You just put it online and you have access to it all different ways,” Thomsen shares.
This digital revolution is truly driving us to change our habits and ensuring quality encourages the prospective audience to trust the platforms and make that change. There’s no telling where we will be within the next five or ten years, but there’s no doubt that most of our life interactions will be taking place online.
The line between online and the privatization of our own lives, work and stuff, is melting together. There is no difference between what we say to our friends or what we say to the world on the internet.
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