MEF Executive Questionnaire #4: Mark Kortekaas, BBC

MEF continues to seek new ways to profile its members and promote the thought-leadership of the senior executives within these companies. We are pleased to launch the MEF Executive Questionnaire to reveal the real people behind the industry in an informal and entertaining manner.

This will be a regular feature of the MEF blog, so make sure you subscribe via email or RSS. If you are a senior executive from one of our member companies and would like to be featured then please contact MEF Marketing Director, Stephen Jenkins.

The fourth in the series is from Mark Kortekaas, Controller Audio & Music & Mobile at the BBC.

1. Please describe briefly your main company activities and your role within that organisation
The BBC exists to enrich people’s lives with great programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain. It provides a wide range of distinctive programmes and services for everyone, free of commercial interests and political bias. They include television, radio, national, local, children’s, educational, language and other services for key interest groups.

My role is to coordinate Mobile and Audio/Music audience facing technology and trends.

2. Without necessarily revealing any confidential information, please outline the principal business models your company uses
We are a public service broadcaster in the UK entirely funded by the UK TV License fee.

3. What has been your company’s greatest achievement to-date?
We have been on mobile for a long time now, what continues to impress us is the increasing monthly usage from our audiences. Some content like sports we all ‘knew’ was going to work well in the space, but the continued usage of long form video via our iPlayer service is something to watch.

4. What is your company currently working on that is going to move the industry forward?
Examining how content moves between mobile, desktop and television in a seamless fashion

5. What is exciting you most in 2010 (either personally or professionally)?
Continued growth of location-aware services

6. What is the most important piece of technology in your life?
Blackberry

7. What mobile device(s) do you use?
N95, Blackberry and iPhone

8. What’s your favourite application?
Mapping, but I’m very impressed with the new google voice search – no more tapping out what you are looking for.

9. What’s your ringtone?
I tend to use what ever the default tone on the device is so I know which unit is ringing

10. Which mobile industry blogs do you regularly read and why?
I am still a bit of a die-hard techy – still watch Slashdot daily as I’ve done for years and hope something there flags me to everything I need to know.

11. What is the biggest mobile content issue that is likely to affect the industry within the next 12 months?
Network capacity issues

12. Which other MEF member organisation do you most admire?
Shazam for helping me figure out what is playing on the radio

The API Arms Race

News of Vodafone’s promise to mobile application builders to create a dedicated channel to market and a billing system for their services has recently caused a stir in the industry.

This signals the importance of smart pipe enablers to the mobile content industry, an area that the MEF has been a strong advocate of as shown by our Smart Pipe Enablers Initiative, which Vodafone is leading, along with mBlox and the BBC.

One of the benefits to the smart pipe approach is that app developers will be able to charge for their products directly through Vodafone’s billing system. Although opening up these APIs could present regulatory problems, MEF is pleased to see that Vodafone is engaging with the content community to come up with the vital business definitions that are complementary to other industry efforts underway. MEF believes advances like this will be a boost for the content industry, allowing the off-portal community - where nearly half of the industry’s $32 billion value resides - to take Mobile Entertainment to the next level.

Vodafone’s announcement also made reference to a framework which will be put in place to provide customers with transparency and control over how their information is accessed and used. This openness and transparency is welcome, as success is intimately dependent upon the quality – reliability and simplicity – of the user experience. Rather than following the technology route and release API after API in a bid to ‘out arm’ their competitors, MEF is pleased to see that the operator is looking at other innovations to support the content community.

By involving the mobile content industry fully in smart pipe approaches such as this, operators can ensure that they are providing relevant services to address the needs of the content community and in turn encourage the enthusiastic uptake of newly-available enabling services. This first step by Vodafone is to be applauded.

MEF will be publishing the results from its Smart Pipe Enablers Market Survey this summer and this will be followed by the first of several White Papers outlining the agreed Service Definitions for Enablers such as bulk SMS, premium billing, short code rental, age-verification, identity authentication and location look-ups amongst many others to work towards a coherent and co-ordinated approach to enablers that delivers cross-operator alignment, sustainable commercial models and regulation of smart pipe enabling services.