www.cipa.org.uk/pages/CaseStudiesRok
Mobile technology development - TV and movies for your mobile phone
Rok Corporation: a CIPA case study
Who wants to watch pop music videos, movies or football games on a tiny mobile phone screen? Right now, about three million mobile phone users in the UK, according to Rok Corporation, and this number is set to rise to 200 million globally by 2008. Rok has the technology that is making it possible – and is fighting hard to stay ahead of the game.
It may have been his spell in the British army, or perhaps his ten years with the ultra-competitive Sir Richard Branson. Either way, Bruce Renny has a well-developed knack for winning in spite of the odds. That’s just as well, now that he’s working at Rok Corporation – an early-stage technology company competing hard in a market dominated by some of the world’s biggest and meanest media and communications groups.
Renny’s boss, Rok’s CEO and Chairman Jonathan Kendrick, founded the company in 2003 with a clearly-stated objective: “We’re going to create the technology to get us a major share of high-growth markets – quickly, and with unassailable IP.” IP in this context being intellectual property – not the ‘internet protocol’ referred to in ‘VOIP’, although Rok has ambitions in that area as well.
The market niche where Rok has focused most of its efforts so far is entertainment content for mobile phones. Bruce Renny was one of Kendrick’s first hires and, as marketing director, he has the task of securing licence deals with movie makers and broadcasters, as well as negotiating with distributors and network operators such as Orange and Vodafone. “Our first objective when we started up was to be able to deliver full-length feature films to a mobile phone,” he explains. “The mobile network operators told us that it couldn’t be done, that downloading a movie would take at least six hours. They had all just mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy their 3G licences and had closed their minds to everything else.”
Undeterred, Bruce Renny and Jonathan Kendrick set Rok’s technical team a four-point challenge:
1.Develop new and unique data compression to allow full-length movies to be transferred quickly.
2.Achieve ‘plug and play’ – no messing about with complicated instructions or cables.
3.Full-screen play, at high speed (24 frames per second, just like in the cinema).
4.Infallible Digital Rights Management (DRM). If the content could be copied by counterfeiters, the movie companies would never grant Rok rights.
The technology – now successfully patented – that achieves all this is embodied in a tiny multi-media card (MMC) that you just slot into your handset. As Bruce Renny demonstrates, starting with a card in an unopened bubble pack, it takes just 30 seconds to get the movie showing on your mobile phone’s screen. Both sound and picture quality are much better than you’d expect, given that all the information is stored on a card about the size of your thumbnail.
“We now have the rights to about 100 titles – movies, TV comedies, animations and music video albums,” Renny states. “In order to persuade the studios to sell us those rights, we had to take the Rok Player prototype demonstrator to Los Angeles and, of course, all the studio bosses wanted to try it out, to check that it would do what I was claiming. If we hadn’t taken the precaution of patenting the technology, I’m sure there would have been quite a few clones on the market by now. Fortunately, Hollywood tends to be quite respectful of other people’s IP rights. If they weren’t, they’d be on very dodgy ground when it came to pursuing the perpetrators of counterfeit DVDs.”
The new format offered by Rok’s mobile phone technology allows the Hollywood producers and rights-holders – such as Sony and Fox – to reissue their back catalogues in MMC format. About 25 titles are already in the shops. Surprisingly, the best-selling feature films for Rok Player are what Bruce Renny calls ‘cult’ movies, including The Shawshank Redemption. Movie sales, however, are greatly out-sold by music videos, exploiting the mobile phone’s new role as a portable sound system with a screen that’s now capable of showing TV-quality moving images.
So far, Rok’s main MMC sales are in the UK, where there are already some 60 million ‘active’ mobile phone handsets – more than one each for every man, woman and child in the country. Of these, about 5%, or three million phones, are already being used to view video material. Rok has plans to roll out its technology globally and has recently signed up distributors in South Africa, Australia, the US and the UAE. Based on projections from handset manufacturers, Renny forecasts that there will be 200 million ‘compatible’ mobile handsets worldwide by 2008. If just 10% of those users were to buy one Rok card each, that’s a market of €1bn.
Little Britain comes to Little Britain
Rok’s firm of patent attorneys, Venner Shipley, is located in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, in a street called Little Britain. No sign of Vicky Pollard in person, but the BBC’s off-beat comedy series is among the programmes for which Rok has just acquired rights for its Rok Player MMC (multi-media memory card). Bruce Renny is in Little Britain for discussions with his patent attorney, Venner Shipley’s Paul Derry, about progress in securing patent protection for Rok’s next two innovations.
While the Rok Player MMC is a triumph of data storage and compression, it still involves the user having to visit a shop or take physical delivery of the MMC card in order to watch the movie. New Rok products in the pipeline will allow mobile phone users to watch broadcast TV on their handsets, receiving the data via the cellular phone network. Paul Derry proves to be a very knowledgeable not only about patent law, but also about the telecommunications industry. “The network operators, such as Vodafone, 3 and Orange3G, have invested billions in 3G licences and infrastructure,” he explains. “It’s going to be a long time before they get a positive return on that investment. Rok have come up with a way of using the existing 2.5G GPRS mobile network – the one that most phones work on – to provide the world’s first multi-channel, live, on-demand TV subscription service. And it’s in the process of being patented.”
World cup matches, live, via your mobile handset
The other piece of technology going through the patenting process is a TV set-top box. The brief to the designers for this was straightforward enough: ‘Come up with a way of getting the World Cup on to mobile phones, in time for the World Cup.’ The box, code-named BLCX, throws TV channels live to mobile phones via broadband internet. According to Rok’s Chairman and CEO, Jonathan Kendrick, “It seemed to us that delivery of the World Cup matches live to mobile phones would be a fantastic opportunity for the development of mobile TV services. But it now appears that only edited highlights of the matches are to be made available, mainly for people on 3G and even then on a pay-per-view basis.” Rok’s solution was to take the signal from whatever TV channels people could receive at home – whether terrestrial, cable or satellite – and, via broadband internet, forward it to a mobile handset. “Providing you have broadband at home,” Kendrick continues, “you simply plug your BLCX into your TV and you can watch whichever
channels you have at home, live and in full, on your mobile, wherever you are and on a ‘what I want, when I want’ basis. You can even change the channels from your mobile.”
According to Bruce Renny, the Rok BLCX set-top box should be available from 1 June 2006 and will be priced at around £250. A later version will have the capability to use VOIP (voice over internet protocol) to allow mobile phone users to connect to the internet via Rok’s ‘black box’, giving them not only ‘free’ phone calls, but also ‘free’ access to other services delivered via broadband – such as IPTV.
So far, Rok’s business development has involved a lot of investment in technology, worldwide patent protection and acquiring rights to movies, music videos and TV programmes.
Rok isn’t the only player in the market, but Bruce Renny is confident that the company has the best technology, with the advantage that it is available now, at an affordable price. Although Rok has no firm plans to float, a listing on AIM or even the US NASDAQ is an option that the board will consider. If that were to happen, Rok’s ‘unassailable IP’ would be an important factor in winning investor confidence.
For more information, contact:
Peter Prowse: 01372 271234
Ted Blake, CIPA: 020 7405 9450
Bruce Renny, Rok: 01902 374896
Paul Derry, Venner Shipley: 020 7600 4212