But don’t really know how to. Their initial plans always seem so perfectly thought up… a great list of selected guests, some fine cuisine with top ingredients, quality artists to make it more enjoyable….. But in the end it all becomes a decadent parody of their initial boasted pretentions.
Orange France just launched Video-Party this week with the objective to create a master video French portal by concentrating all FT’s web-video products (VOD, WebTV, OCS) and adding some more web trends they’ve considered important (and traditionally out of scope for big O) like a web-series sub-portal (for now only listing Rockville).
Orange has been pretty busy cooking up several video products since the streaming Hulu model became a hit more than 2 years ago. It has quickly transformed into some kind of obsession for all European content distributors, producers and TV channels as the possibilities of this business model seemed infinite and the risks of an imminent Hulu European version could be disastrous. Unfortunately neither the British nor French have managed to overcome their strict public policies and expensive deals signed with the major American studios.
An obsession everyone has but no-one can materialize, seeing how millions of € dilute with upcoming & endless promises.
One of those Orange video products is “Welles” an ambitious “personal tv” project dead-born in the Orange Vallée cell. Jean-Louis Constanza (OV director) pushed pretty hard as he believes that on-line video will keep growing in the coming years.
Welles (named as a tribute to Orson Welles) was meant to be launched this year and should have offered free, advertising-supported streaming of popular, older TV shows, docus and movies plus some high-premium paid-for content from a library of 500,000 items. UGC and links to other Orange video-products could also have been included.
But right before Welles saw the daylight, another video wannabe product (this time by Orange’s Audience & Advertising Lob) appeared in Orange.fr portal three days ago: Video-Party.
VP is at first sight a simple hub for the already existing Orange web-video services: VOD, catch-up TV, Cinema-Series….etc. A portal which aims at concentrating all video-related universes in a single search&watch experience. In fact it becomes a major frame to all previous existing video portals so the Orange customer doesn’t have to jump from one to another through the main Orange.fr portal. However our first impression of VP is that of a poor selection of content which won’t incite any user to dig into the supposedly much richer video experience offered by Orange.
But VP (which for now is still under development and in its very early stage) has just as many ambitions as Welles seemed to have. VP should start concentrating many of those video services as part of their own offer (not just by adding other branded Orange websites) including music, cinema, series… and also with a very “social side” building a user community around the Orange video universe (not only through votes or comments but 3rd party social integration…. etc).
The problem for Orange once again is the lack of communication & coordination between their different units & countries. Instead of focusing in a single proposition many of their departments have come up with resembling ideas & have developed, tested and tried to release what seem to be fairly similar services.
This November was also the month chosen by Orange Israel to advertise “Orange Time”, a more evolved but very similar Internet TV platform aimed at the Hebrew & Russian Orange clients. An “entertainment portal” with movies, TV series, music, blogs & games… pretty much what they intend for Video-Party.
Wouldn’t it be easier to reuse already existing platforms & resources rather than developing parallel services in each country?
And at the same time Orange tries to launch its own party the rumors of a French universal catch-up portal by the other three main actors (Canal+, TF1 & M6) keep growing since last October; even FT seems to be pretty much interested.
Apparently they would be trying block the arrival of Hulu.fr, but such a dream was already dreamt before and it never came true.
See you @ Bristol
