MTV Base builds on African mobile use and UGC

Have you heard of MTV Base? I hadn’t until this past weekend when the first African Music awards show was held. They’re something awesome with their awards show though, they let viewers vote for winners via text message. So, what is MTV Base? Launched in 2005, MTV Base is a 24 hour music channel in 10.5 million households in 48 Sub-Saharan African countries. Their target audience is the youth of Africa, and after exploring their website/portal a bit, it looks like they are doing it.

The first thing that caught my attention was in the request show slide that appeared in the main module. It is completely integrated with text messaging and email. That makes it easy for users to participate, even on the go, and even if they don’t have access to a computer. Good deal.

So then I decided to explore the other offerings, such as, “what’s on TV”. The fun thing about looking through the shows that are offered is, users rate them, so you can see what users are and aren’t liking. Apparently, they are not liking ‘A shot at love with Tila Tequila’ (she only has 1 star). I was humored to see the Cure was the current featured artist. It really wasn’t what I was expecting. But the artists also have the voting option and the Cure is at 4/5 stars. I secretly love the Cure, so this actually made me quite happy.

And then we get to the gallery section, specifically the videos, my favorite section of the site because it features user submitted videos . African music makes me insanely happy. So does user created content. And you can tell that people are taking their work seriously. There are also professional videos to watch. (Did you know that the UN produces music? I found this video that was actually submitted by a user, it’s in French, but the title is “Disarm our hearts” and it’s about bringing peace to Congo and features some of the well known Congolese artists. Check it out, it’s a beautiful song). Now I’m not crazy about the flash player that they are using on the site, but it works.

There is also a competition section and some partnership microsites. Their current big partner is of course, a mobile company Sony Ericsson and they have a special Player microsite. For all of this great integration of mobile content and user interaction there is one draw back… the site is almost completely in flash with lots of mobile browsers have trouble loading. Plus, it means that the site is going to load that much more slowly on slower connections. Still, this was a happy find that I am happy to share. This also provides great fodder for YouTube searches. Just do a search for MTV Base on YouTube and you’ll end up with a lot of really great videos you might not have found otherwise. One of the first things that came up was a Making the Video of Dizzie Rascal making the video for “Dance with me”, a song that was recently featured on Entourage. Good deal. I’m off to watch Cribs Ghana, a parody.