Sebastien Marteau

In an exclusive interview with Vijaya Cherian, Sebastien Marteau, Vice President of Intigral, talks about the company’s newly launched applications and how the company intends to take the vision forward

Tell us a bit about the mobile part of Intigral’s business?

Sebastien:

We are a master content and service aggregator. There are two parts to this business – the service provider and the content provider. The former comprises media groups, which have the media reach. They monetise their content themselves. We provide them with the daily connectivity and some content as well. In addition to the daily connectivity, we give them access to all they can leverage. They do the marketing themselves. We have scores of service providers that offer various services. Some of them are media groups and some are rentals that come under the service provider umbrella. MBC is one such example.

We also work with rights owners that comprise the content providers and build services. In this way, we work with multiple content providers for different services spanning news, women’s services, kids, family, games, music, entertainment and music to cover the entire spectrum of programming.

What was your perception of this region when you first came here?

The Middle East is a very young market and what is really encouraging is the appetite for our kind of services. With a large chunk of the population being below 30 years, the level of consumption is very high and the engagement is very interesting here. Saudi Arabia is the second biggest market for YouTube consumption per capita. One sees similar trends with the social networks as well. It’s a very unique market.

What are the challenges you faced when you came here?

We had to work on improving the infrastructure. Then, working with telco operators is a challenge by itself. The operators here don’t really understand the value they can get from content. They look at the content business as a revenue generation centre. What they don’t understand is the type of differentiation you can make with content and how that can impact on consumption and customer satisfaction. They are very advanced in terms of market segmentation, nationalities, preferences and so on but they forget that content can be a big add on. For instance, we have so many expats here and they are so eager to consume content from their own countries and operators must exploit this. So for instance, if you offer the right cricket service to blue collar workers, who have access to entertainment primarily on their mobile phone that opens up a whole revenue stream for you. This would be a huge differential factor if they would see it.

Tell us a bit about the SMS versus communication apps debate?

There are two aspects here.

One, we see that today more messages are exchanged on Whatsapp than on SMS. This is really one of the big challenges for the operator today. The traditional SMS services have generated so much money for the telcos but there’s been a significant shift in the way content is consumed today. They need to make that business shift.

The overall mobile industry has been based on the GSM standard traditionally but users today want to share videos, pictures and music, which can only be achieved if the operators deploy solutions to cater to these. That’s why Whatsapp is turning into a global standard. The mobile industry is evolving at a speed that society has never witnessed before.

So on the one hand, you see that communication apps that can offer more features such as allowing you to share videos, pictures and so on, free of charge and across the globe are gaining significance over traditional SMS. The second aspect is the social aspect.

If you look at this generation of digital natives i.e. those born with an iPad or iPhone, for them, connectivity is a given and the use of social messaging tools is a part of their daily lives. This generation seems to favour the one-to-many approach of Facebook and Twitter rather than the traditional one-to-one method of SMS. The one-to-many approach seems to offer more values such as sharing one’s status, seeing friends reacting and so on.

Telcos who don’t make these components part of their regular service are in serious trouble.

How can telcos address the threat from apps such as Whatsapp?

It is clearly a technical disruption; they need to adapt to it. In some markets, the telcos are offering zero charge for the use of SMS as part of their mobile package. They could also potentially consider a partnership with Whatsapp or Skype where the operator markets Whastapp as part of its package with zero data charges on the service. It could be part of your differentiaion factor if you partner with them and helps you to build loyalty with customers. The value of this messaging application, however, is scale and volume and this is where telcos have reason to worry. Apps like Whatsapp are universal so instantly, they become very attractive while local telcos are limited to offering services that are limited to the local market.

What, according to you, are the three big communication apps?

On the social messaging side, there is BBM, iMessenger, Whatsapp, and also, Viber and Skype.

You recently built an app for the Saudi Football Championships?

Yes, we did. It is called Dawri Plus and was launched about three months ago. It’s actually a live streaming service for the Saudi Premiere League games. Users can watch the games live on their mobiles and they can access older games for the season; DVD-type features; timeline of all the major events; access to real-time statistics around the players and teams such as shots on targets, passes, possession, lineups, cards, substitutions and so on; and social networking. Any service you bring today must have the social networking component in that service so this has been incorporated as well.

Currently, we are in the first stage of marketing it. We have seen some very good usage. We have seen people stay for nearly 40 minutes on the website at one time.

It is very interesting to see the usage both on the website and the application which shows that people are consuming long-form video content even on the smartphone.

We also had about 5000 “consecutive” users on the website.

Would you consider charging for your app in the future?

We might go into a solution where if you want to watch Dawri Plus, you will pay some sort of fee. The app can be bundled as a co-offering to make the most of the offering. We offer a lot of applications in Arabic on our app store.

I believe you are working on a new portal for STC as well?

Yes, we are bringing a completely new thing called STC mode. This is the model, where you can access any type of content in a very structured and new way in terms of user experience. What we are doing on STC mode is all the type of content that you could imagine from news, women, mobile ads, from Islamic services, game services and a lot of education services.

It is a completely new way to consume content. We are also bringing a sports vertical, which is very important. With this, you can access the service on any device.

We have reworked the design and the interface so people find it more attractive. For us, this is one of the big developments we have at the moment.

What is Intigral’s vision for the mobile division?

Our main work as Intigral is to develop the ecosystem in the right way, to make it grow and to offer more capabilities to third parties. Our objective is to create ways to monetise content so innovation is happening especially where Arabic content is concerned. It is important to find new routes to make this content available to audiences through telco partners and we are doing this.