The Dutch social network Hyves.nl with 5,6 million registrations is very prominent in the press at present. During a meeting of the Dutch cross-media network iMMovator later on radio, Yme Bosma, business developer at Hyves.nl, explained that Hyves.nl starts to deliver movies to digital television channels from mid March onwards through Hyves.tv. Presently Hyves.nl friends look at movies for 15.000 times a month. And this is only the beginning. Hyves.nl will have to do this as it will be up against competition in the near future of the Dutch version of MySpace and indirectly of the international version of Facebook.Yme Bosma told the audience that Hyves.nl friends are not always online. Especially in the weekend the pageviews jumped up and down and people used mobile to consult Hyves.nl. These are indications for Hyves.nl that the Hyves.nl users want to view Hyves.nl whenever and wherever.
Hyves.nl now wants to extend its movie content to digital television as well the Who What and Where info of users. TV viewers will be able to see movies and can call up user profiles. In the first instance Tele2 will transmit the pages trough its digital channel to a television set. Other digital channel operators will also be able to transmit this feature in due time.
The announcement brought back memories of webTV, for which Philips bought a European license and never used it. Yet this rendering of internet on television works differently. WebTV had a local converter box. Hyves.tv will use technology of Avinity, Technically this will mean that the ‘signal’ goes to the company Avinity, which will convert the signal to television format in size and pixels.
Yme Bosma also believes that the Hyves television community will start another trend. The group will be able to compose its own electronic program guide by voting for the best videos. The users can also show their relatives movies they put up on internet.
Hyves.nl willl have to be very active in the coming time. Although Yme Bosma did not say a word about the competition, MySpace launched a Dutch edition of MySpace including its own ad sales office. So far MySpace has experimented with a Dutch trial site and picked up some 400.000 users, but now it will aggressively go into the market. That is what Travis Katz, managing director of MySpace during his presentation. He does not see Hyves.nl as a problem, remarking that in every country so far they always found a competitor against them He referred to the situation in Germany where MySpace superseded the incumbent social network.MySpace has developed a Dutch language site with its own content. It has its own music and video channels. It will also show content specially produced for MySpace in the Netherlands, just like the thriller series Beyond the Rave in the UK and the drama series Quarterback in the USA. MySpace Benelux will also organise offline events like small intimate surprise concerts with popular musicians, singers and entertainers.
It will be interesting to see, whether MySpace will make it in the Netherlands. MySpace does not possess the Dutch domain name; the site does mention that it is not related to Myspace.com. Recently a National Day Against MySpace was organised. MySpace users were called by the message: MySpace users fed up with glitchy pages, annoying banner ads and an abundance of spam may finally have the motivation to take the plunge and delete their accounts. Wednesday (February 7th,2008) is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day, an online protest geared at uniting users eager to ditch the popular social networking site. But also business wise, MySpace will have trouble to be profitable in the Netherlands. IT would not be the first international internet company that did not make it. Yahoo.com abandoned its sales offices in the Netherlands. It is a country with only 16,5 million inhabitants, with a language different from English and a television oriented advertisement market; on the other hand English is a second language to all Dutchmen and many people prefer to join the international edition of MySpace and Facebook due to their global orientation. And given the home grown social network of Hyves.nl, I still have to see that a Benelux office will survive.
Blog Posting Number: 1004
Tags: social network, webtelevision
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