Six3: Video messaging on mobile sucks, so we reinvented it

Like so many other ideas, this one behind Six3 was borne not in some industry brainstorm, but from a 'regular' person's frustration at the limitations of what was previously available.

In this instance the 'civilian' was Leigh Middleton, a former staffer at the music consultancy Frukt, who wondered why – for all the sophistication of smartphones and data networks – it was so difficult to send videos of his newborn baby to friends and family.

The options seemed to be: record a clip and send by MMS or email; upload to YouTube; do a Skype call.

None was satisfactory.

Why, he wondered, couldn't he just take a short video and send it in a single click to one or many contacts for instant viewing, or for save and watch later?

He explained this to his mate Tim Grimsditch, who was part of Nokia’s music team and helped to launch Comes With Music before departing in 2011 to pursue his own ideas.

Grimsditch immediately sensed the potential and a business plan was born. But it really flew when Grimsditch got a similarly enthusiastic response from his old acquaintance Simon Frost, the technical architect of the BBC iPlayer. When he came on as CTO, Six3 was off and running.

The elevator pitch behind Six3 is to make creating, viewing and replying to video messages as easy as SMS.

It is currently in private beta, and will launch publicly in a few weeks. For now, the service works on iPhones, Macs and PCs. But eventually, Six3 will work on all smartphones, internet-connected TVs and games consoles.

So what's the big problem with the current video situation? According to Grimsditch, the issue with email is that the recipients have to download huge files, and they have to switch between their email client and the video recorder function to reply.

Meanwhile MMS is unreliable and data intensive, while YouTube is fiddly and is not really appropriate for private communications.

And as for Skype, well that takes a lot of upfront co-ordination to set up on both sides of the call.

Grimsditch says: "We have all these great comms channels these days – Twitter, Skype, MMS, SMS – but none has really mastered video. We want to build a service that is extremely simple and lets people just record and send. And the recipient is free to reply at their leisure, with all communications between the two filed like a conversation, as simply as if they were texts or emails."

Another benefit is that these video messages can be sent across even 2.5G networks because – as little broadcasts rather than real-time conversations – they do not need to be dispatched immediately in one fat file.

They could even be sent overnight when the networks are less congested. This gives Six3 a possible commercial opportunity in emerging markets.

According to Grimsditch, there are just two established firms in the space – Vimessa and Ravid – but he thinks there's a real market opportunity for Six3 because the former is very US focused while the latter is for Android only.

So, what about making money? Well, the idea is to offer the basic app for free and sell upgrades such as colour filters, HD recording and archiving beyond a set period. Six3 is also looking at a Spotify-style model where the service is free for a fixed number of messages, but paid beyond that. Branded channels are another possibility.

Advertising is currently not on the menu. "There's no transactional element here, so I see branded channels as a better avenue for brands than advertising," says Grimsditch.

So, last question, why Six3? Grimsditch says the initial idea related to a 63 second limit on video messages, but when they googled the name, a couple of neat coincidences made the name essential.

He says: "We quickly realised that Six Three is shorthand in Spanish speaking countries for 'great' and that its also the name of a protein in DNA that relates to eyesight. That made it the perfect name."