Slicing Open The Orange

Orange is to open up its ringback tones services to third parties, allowing brands and media companies to cash in on the predicted £440 million market.

The operator’s ringback tones will be l

Orange is to open up its ringback tones services to third parties, allowing brands and media companies to cash in on the predicted £440 million market.

The operator’s ringback tones will be launched next year. In September, Ovum predicted that the market, currently worth $16m (£9m) in Western Europe, would reach $721m (£400m) by 2008.

'We appreciate that we need to open up the network, in terms of discovery, billing and transport,' said Orange head of third party services Ben Hirsch. 'We're trying to open up the breadth and depth of content.'

Many observers believe that ringback tones hold a similar potential to ringtones, which have already proved incredibly successful for brands and media owners. T-Mobile was first to launch in the UK last December, with 500,000 European subscribers by June.

Orange has already launched the first stage of its 'tier two' portal and says it's committed to further improving the search facilities for consumers, so they can navigate more easily to third party content from its Orange World portal.