Vivendi pulling a MOSH? There is a trend here

Vivendi just launched something called Zaoza, which sounds as equally ridiculous as MOSH, and from the sound of the service looks to be as equally uninteresting:

The French company held a press conference Feb. 19 to launch a multimedia service called Zaoza, Chinese for “word of mouth” or “buzz,” that will work on mobile phones and personal computers and later perhaps on TV set-top boxes. Zaoza will offer consumers unlimited downloads of exclusive content—including music, ringtones, video clips, and games—from a variety of content partners for €3 ($4.40) per month. The twist is that subscribers will be able to share—to and from PCs and mobile devices—everything they download with up to five friends.

Call me a cynic, but this will not take off. People want free, free and free. The ringtone market is actually in decline and if you expect people to pay for music or videoclips, when they can instead use something like the youtube application or sideload their content, then you’re grossly mistaken. The only redeaming aspect of this service is that you can share your content with up to 5 friends. An artificial limit that is no doubt using DRM to castrate any potential word of mouth marketing around a brand to take place. While MOSH has unlimited sharing that can be done with anyone, it is plagued by big corporations having hissy fits over copyright infringments.

There is a trend however, two actually. First of all more and more companies are starting to market their mobile services directly to consumers, while at the same time sharing profits with [read: ass kissing] operators to leverage scale. Second we’re seeing that people like to share [ZOMG 4REAL!] stuff with their friends, but they don’t have a standard way of doing that and/or are too dumb to configure their device’s native email client to their account. How do you monitize sharing and more importantly do you want to monitize it?

Our mobile phones today lack the horse power to become full time nodes on a bit torrent network, never mind there are still artificial bandwidth limits placed on consumers by the same people who cry that newly invested infrastructure isn’t used to it’s full potential, but what happens the number of packets generated by mobile phones reaches par with those generated by personal computers? More importantly, how long do you think it will take until this happens? I’m going to be bold and say 5 years. What will the business models look like then, will operators become pipes at that point since that seems to be the direction they’re heading in?

Too many questions, too deep of an analysis for a service you shouldn’t even bat an eyelid for.