SAPO Videos to surf on the Internet
Thursday, December 28, 2006
With the motto “portugality” for 2007, the SAPO portal today launched the new video service. This is a free tool which is thought in Portuguese for the Portuguese, which allows users to share their videos with the SAPO community and, as well as other functions, configure their own “television channels”
At a press conference, the SAPO portal announced, this afternoon, the launching of their SAPO Video service, available at http://videos.sapo.pt. After a year filled with great conquests and exponential growth, the leading Portal in Portugal continues to bet on technological innovation with the dissemination of our mother language.
Luís Soares, product manager of SAPO Videos, presented the service, which, in BETA version, allows the upload and
download of videos of up to 10 minutes, in Portuguese and for the Portuguese community. Other than being able to visualise their videos, users can also, among other functions, choose a set of videos from a type of play list as if they were dealing with a personalised television channel.
To use this service, all the user has to do is have an email account on SAPO to register, and then, accept the usage conditions of the site, to ensure the legality, security and privacy of the site. As of today, this site has 15 thousand videos, imported from SAPO XL, from goals from the Bwin Football league, Song BMG music clips, Lusomundo cinema trailers and other broad band multimedia contents. With the help received from the feedback of the Portuguese internet users, Luís Soares hopes that this service, which is still in an experimental phase, is yet another bet won by SAPO.
For Rodrigo Costa, Chairman of PT Comunicações, “SAPO’s success is unquestionable; it is the brand which represents the Internet in Portugal because it is so close to its users”. During the presentation of the new service, the Chairman of the PT Group company also mentioned that the success of the SAPO portal in 2006 “is thanks to the technical capacity of the team”. With approximately 800 thousand visits per day and with an increase in earnings of around 42%, “results can be seen”.
Inserted in a dynamic market and facing international competitors, SAPO is a unique case by being leader in its country of origin and “dethrone” the big foreign players. Abílio Martins, Director at PT.Com, reinforced that the “main reasons for the success of the portal pass through its transformation and innovation capacity, especially for meeting the needs of users and the community to which SAPO is closer”.
The primacy given to the language and to Portuguese contents is the portals differentiation mark which also responds to approximately 12% of the SAPO user universe, which visits the site from a foreign country, name the PALOPs. Celso Martinho, Technical Manager of SAPO, states that this video service in a “bet in the axle of Portugality, in Portuguese language contents and an added value against our competitors”. For João Paulo Luz, Commercial Manager at
SAPO, “the difference is in the responding to user needs, with a technical support which is also ensured by Portuguese people”.
The first halfof the following year also reserves other surprises which follow the transversality between various SAPO services, such as SAPO Videos and SAPO Messenger. Another novelty will be SAPO Local where each Portuguese county can have its own page with local contents and news.
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