VHA to channel content through Mnet

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 15 April 2010 16:48

IT Industry - Deals

Mnet Group (ASX: MNZ) has been appointed as master content aggregator for Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) for its various content portals including Vodafone Live! and the former Hutchison network's Planet 3 service.

The agreement requires Mnet Group to establish, host, manage, operate, supply and maintain music, tones and games content for Vodafone Hutchison Australia. Mnet says technical and product integration will commence immediately.

CEO, Horden Wiltshire, told iTWire "What is interesting about this deal is that there is one master aggregator, ourselves, across games, music and tones. These have effectively been outsourced to a third party. Generally what has happened in the past is that there have been different providers for different verticals: games, music etc.

Mnet provides subsets of this range of services to other mobile operators in Australia. Wiltshire said: "We do video for Optus, we manage a number of portals for Telstra including ringback tone, horse racing and fashion and their self-care portal and we provide content aggregation service to Telecom New Zealand."

Mnet Group, was formed in September 2009 by the merger of the former ASX-listed mobile content mobile content specialist, Mercury Mobility and m.Net Corporation then owned by Yahoo!7, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Yahoo Digital Media (Content), Alcatel-Lucent Australia, Telstra and CVC Limited. These shareholders and the shareholders of Mercury Mobility each held, initially 50 percent of the new company.

The group new claims to be "one of world's leading mobile content retailers; developing and optimising content for organisations like DreamWorks, Disney, ACP (FHM, ZooWeekly), Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music, Universal, WWE, AFL and the NHL."