Agence France-Presse (AFP), a global news agency, and Skycore
LLC, a mobile technology firm specializing in Multimedia Messaging
Services (MMS), announced the immediate availability of
AFP-licensed content for publishers to deliver MMS-formatted news to
their audience's mobile phones using Skycore's
Cellyspace.com MMS platform.
Newspapers and magazines can choose from a broad selection of AFP's
licensable content and offer it to their audiences as branded MMS.
Publishers can also choose the frequency, time of day, amount of new
content to include with each MMS and whether their messaging services
are offered as ad-supported, sponsored or premium
The premium subscriptions option costs end-users $2.99/month with the
fee appearing on the recipient's mobile phone
bill. Revenue is shared between the carriers, end-publishers, and Cellyspace.com.
For ad-supported and sponsored feeds, publishers use Cellyspace.com
templates to insert pre-roll ("front page")
and post-roll ("back cover")
slides for branding and product ads. All slides, including content
slides ("run-of-MMS"),
can have URL's embedded in each message
linking readers to additional mobile content.
This MMS news product is powered by Skycore's Cellyspace.com
MMS platform, which delivers content in a slideshow format optimized
for each handset. Content is delivered using MMS technology for most
handsets because MMS allows content to be received in a subscriber's
inbox in the same, familiar way they currently receive text messages
(SMS). Additionally, each MMS message can include up to eight (8) or
more slides with images and 4000+ characters of text.
"AFP is a highly respected, global agency
with a network of journalists and photographers in 165 countries who
deliver media-rich stories which translate extremely well to MMS. We are
excited to be working with them to give publishers and their advertisers
an effective and innovative means to directly engage their audiences
whenever and wherever they are and drive traffic to their mobile web
sites," said Rich Eicher, President, Skycore,
LLC.
AFP's news content covers the events that
shape the US and the world, from wars, conflicts and politics to sports,
entertainment and the latest breakthroughs in health, science and
technology.
"AFP news content is ideal for publishers
looking to engage and interact with their audience using compelling
international news, entertainment and sports from a trusted, established
news agency," says Gilles Tarot, Sales and
Marketing Director for AFP North America. "For
newspapers and magazines, the combination of their local/regional
content with AFP news for use on the Cellyspace MMS platform is a
win-win situation."