O2 Active

» see active.o2.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

o2 active was uk-only at the carrier layer, plus ireland germany and the netherlands where telefónica also owned the o2 brand. i did not have an o2 sim. turkey had turkcell and telsim (vodafone-turkey after 2006), which ran their own carrier portals of the same era, on the same wap plumbing, with the same fate. the specific brand o2 active never appeared on any handset i owned.

what o2 active actually was: the default homepage on the wap browser that shipped with every o2-branded handset from 2002 to about 2008. it came out of bt cellnet's genie internet portal, launched in 1999. when bt cellnet demerged from bt group in october 2001 and rebranded as o2 in may 2002, genie got renamed o2 active across the four telefónica-owned markets. content was carrier-curated: news headlines, ringtone shop, wallpaper shop, mobile java games, sports scores, weather, chat rooms, and premium-sms subscriptions to horoscopes or football alerts.

the business model was the reason the portal existed. carrier-billed content revenue was the whole point of a walled garden. o2 got a cut of every ringtone bought through active, every subscription flowed through the o2 monthly bill instead of a credit card. the same jamster / jamba ringtone empire that dominated european tv ads in 2005-2006 sold most of its inventory through carrier portals like this one. o2 active was where the transaction actually happened.

this whole world was english-speaking and european from my angle. really though, it lived at the wap layer, meaning tiny mono screens with hardware buttons, nokia symbian devices, sony ericsson feature phones. i had a sagem and a couple of nokias through that whole period and my wap experience was mostly turkcell's mobil dünya portal (later renamed a couple of times), never o2 active. the shape was the same though. carrier homepage, ringtones for a fee, news feed from a licensing deal, that was the whole pattern.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what killed it ~

the iphone shipped in june 2007. safari on a phone rendered normal websites. after that, the reason to open a carrier-branded wap portal instead of just typing bbc.co.uk into a real browser started evaporating. for a couple of years the operators tried to keep active alive by pushing app content and location-based deals through it. then it got quiet. o2 launched priority moments in july 2011 as the successor concept: not a portal, more a loyalty-and-deals app for customers, tied to retailers. by 2012 the o2 active url was more or less a redirect and the brand was retired.

~ what got buried ~

the carrier walled garden model died with active and its siblings. really though, for about a decade every mobile operator in the world assumed they would be the front door for mobile content. that was the entire justification for wap. safari on iphone plus chrome on android turned that assumption inside out in about four years. what got buried alongside o2 active was the specific idea that a telco could own the discovery layer for services on top of its own network. by 2013 nobody was trying to open the o2 active homepage on purpose (name of the last product manager escapes me). the app store had won that fight.

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