Moviso

» see moviso.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Moviso sold nothing in Turkey. Its entire business was the North American carriers, and in 2003 I was not buying anything through a phone at all, since what money there was went to the internet cafe by the hour. Ringtones did arrive here, and they arrived the way most things arrived, through the operator and a short code rather than through a website with a shopping cart.

That difference is most of the story. Moviso was the company that built the shopping cart, and then put somebody else's name on the front of it. If you bought a ringtone from a carrier in the United States or Canada between about 2001 and 2005, there is a good chance the transaction ran through machines this company owned, under a brand that was not this company's.

By its own accounting it held over 60 percent of that market. It was also, by its own accounting, the first business to sell downloadable content into the North American wireless networks at all. Both claims come from an About page that survives only in the archive, because Moviso never got an encyclopedia entry and the press wrote about its owners instead.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the name before the name ~

The company was founded in 1993 as Global Music One LLC, which puts its birth two years before the web had a commercial music business to speak of. Between 1995 and 1997 it built Electric Records, a paid song-download platform running on Bell Labs' AAC codec, and then co-built AT&T's a2b music on the same foundation. That is a company that was selling audio files over a network while most of its future customers were still on dial-up.

In 2000 it pointed the same publishing platform at phones. The front end was a free site called Yourmobile.com, which by the company's count served close to 100 million files to 12 million handsets across 85 countries, funded either per download or by advertising. In 2001 it spun the white-label side out as Premium Wireless Services, and moviso.com was still serving a Premium Wireless Services page as late as 2003. Vivendi Universal Net bought the company in 2002 and renamed it Moviso, an acronym the company glossed as mobile vision and sound.

~ what a trutone cost ~

The trademark that mattered was TruTone, Moviso's name for a ringtone that was an actual recording rather than a monophonic transcription. Celebrity voice clips got their own trademark under it. So did sound effects. In November 2002 the company pushed polyphonic tones and color images out to most of North America at once, and the ringtone boom that everybody remembers from the mid 2000s starts roughly there.

The last working front page, captured on 30 June 2007, lists them by price. Chingy featuring Three 6 Mafia, $2.99. Diddy, $2.99. A catalog licensed from more than 250 rights holders, sold thirty seconds at a time, at a per-second price that made compact discs look generous. Nobody was confused about the economics. The carriers took their cut, Moviso took its cut, and for about four years it was one of the most profitable content businesses on the continent.

~ temporarily down ~

InfoSpace bought Moviso from Vivendi Universal Net USA in October 2003 for $25 million in cash and immediately buried the brand: by August 2004 moviso.com was serving a page headed InfoSpace Mobile. The name came back in mid 2006 as a consumer storefront, ran for a year, and then on 12 June 2007 InfoSpace sold it to FunMobility along with the licensing rights to its mobile platform, and closed its Los Angeles operation.

Nine days later the storefront still worked. By 9 July 2007 every page on moviso.com, including the individual purchase URLs, returned the same 688 bytes: "Moviso.com is temporarily down. Please try again later." That sentence was still the entire contents of the site on 3 February 2011, three and a half years after anyone stopped meaning it. By 2014 the domain was a parking page inviting inquiries.

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