Cielo Group and Cinema Electric win “Best Mobile Video Service” award

February 18, 2006 – Barcelona –  Portable Hollywood™ – a mobile entertainment application published by partners Cielo Group in Boston and LA-based Cinema Electric – has been cited for the Silver medal for “Best Mobile Video Service” at the 3GSM World Congress.  Awards given by the GSM Association are viewed as “the Oscars of the Mobile Phone Industry.”

Portable Hollywood is a cell-phone-resident entertainment “magazine” that packages daily video streaming of Hollywood features with celebrity photo archives, news, blogging and celebrity trivia – all refreshed daily so subscribers use the application every day, throughout the day.  Portable Hollywood features a different celebrity video “theme” for each day of the week, from red-carpet celebrity interviews to previews of newly released movies.  Judges heralded the application for its user-interface design that makes it exceptionally easy to navigate and for the frequency that content – filmed specifically for mobile screens – is refreshed.     

The Portable Hollywood application can be quickly rebranded and re-skinned for consumer-goods and entertainment companies, seeking to extend their brand to the mobile channel and provide a compelling lifestyle/affinity experience. 

Portable Hollywood was created jointly by content provider Cinema Electric and Cielo Group, which developed the application. Cielo also hosts and manages the product and performs subscription-billing for carriers.  The application is discovered and distributed worldwide through Jamster and other channels.

“Unlike one-time downloads of content such as ringtones, Portable Hollywood is a full, interactive, handset-resident application that connects consumers continuously to new streaming content,” said Cielo President Dean Macri.  

Other differentiators follow:

• Portable Hollywood is the only handset-resident entertainment application that combines streaming daily and archive video and audio with ever-changing image galleries of celebrities, trivia games, news, gossip, and content downloads.
• Portable Hollywood allows consumer-brand companies to own the relationship with subscribers, enabling them to quickly gather profile information for targeted communications and to utilize interactive features that open new marketing and revenue opportunities.  The nature of the cell-phone-resident application offers significant advantages in communicating and marketing to consumers compared with traditional text-message-based campaigns.       
• Unlike linear mobile broadcast services such as MobiTV and Vcast, Portable Hollywood streams video on demand as only one part of a complete handset-resident application, offering a robust entertainment experience. 
• Unlike broadcast content that must be repurposed for mobile phones and screens, video for Portable Hollywood is shot and produced by Cinema Electric specifically and optimally for cell phones.
• Portable Hollywood is a consumer-ready total product offering, including both an intelligent handset-resident client and server that performs intermediary management, hosting and billing services.  Therefore, it can be quickly re-branded, re-skinned and implemented for a company seeking its own mobile identify and “affinity” community.  

Cinema Electric CEO James F. Robinson, a movie director and Directors Guild member, foresaw the cell phone early on as the fourth movie screen.  “We built our company to produce original content specifically for the mobile handset so we can provide a superior viewing experience than movie and broadcast content retrofitted for cell phones.” 

Portable Hollywood’s actual screen captures illustrate the quality of its: 1) video streaming, 2) full-screen image galleries, and 3) a handset portal that offers downloads of celebrity-related content.  

About Cielo Group
Cielo Group (www.cielo-group.com) publishes, hosts and manages interactive, subscription-based wireless applications that extend the reach of media, sports, and entertainment properties and consumer-products companies.