Vodafone live!

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

~ the obit ~

vodafone did not exist as a mobile carrier in turkey until 2006, when the group bought telsim off the state trustee and rebranded. before that the network anyone i knew ran on was turkcell or aycell. by the time vodafone had a turkish sim card, vodafone live! was already past its european peak. i knew the brand from ads and from a couple of friends who ended up on vodafone tr around '07-'08. i never touched the portal itself.

the service launched on 24 october 2002 in eight markets at once. the pitch was europe's answer to japan's i-mode, which had turned NTT DoCoMo into a mobile-content juggernaut. by may 2003 vodafone had 1.5 million subscribers on live!, by 2005 the icon sat on the home screen of every vodafone handset in europe. mms messaging plus downloadable ringtones and java games, all carrier-billed to the monthly phone bill. the whole idea was to keep the subscriber inside the operator's own portal instead of letting the open web onto the phone.

the model started to shake the moment the iphone shipped in june 2007. safari on a phone made the walled-garden portal look silly. the app store followed a year later. by 2009 vodafone was in a rebrand-or-die spot. they picked rebrand. vodafone live! got folded into vodafone 360 in september 2009, which was meant to be a modern social-plus-app service. 360 itself was killed off by late 2011, which is when the register wrote the "vodafone ditches 360" story.

i was on turkcell then avea in those years, watching wap portals from the outside anyway. anyway, ttnet at home, wap on the phone was already something i had stopped opening by '08. either way, the whole carrier-portal era was over before smartphones fully landed in turkey. by the time android was cheap enough for turkish teenagers to have one, the answer to "how do i get a ringtone" was not a portal anymore, it was a folder on the sd card.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the portal worked ~

carrier-billing was the whole trick. you did not need a credit card. the fee for a ringtone or a java game hit your monthly bill through the operator, which was one of the few things that carriers could do that apple and google would not do for another decade. the tradeoff was that vodafone controlled what showed up in the portal. content had to be signed, priced through vodafone, delivered through vodafone's own gateway. any brand that wanted to sell on live! had to negotiate with vodafone at a shortcode level. this is how jamba (already dead in the neighboring plot) rode the same carrier-billing pipes into a couple of billion euros of ringtone revenue.

~ the actual end ~

the iphone did not kill vodafone live! by launching. it killed live! by shifting the frame. once the phone had a real browser and an app store, the walled-garden pitch stopped making sense to anyone who had used a proper phone. vodafone tried the rebrand into 360 with a social-network-plus-app-shop angle, and it lasted about two years before quietly getting shelved in 2011. some markets kept the vodafone live! branding on legacy portal urls into 2012 and 2013, but the actual service was already dead by september 2009.

~ what got buried ~

the whole idea that carriers could run their own content platform. o2 active was already dying in the uk. orange world in france was fading. verizon v cast was in the us. all the same category, all killed by roughly the same iphone-plus-app-store sequence between 2007 and 2013. the walled garden had its shot at being the mobile internet and lost. the successor version of the story was that the two app stores (apple and google) became the actual walled gardens, and the carriers went back to being pipes. vodafone live! is what the losing side of that fight looked like from inside europe.

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