QTom: The Revolution to Music Television?

QTom attempts to bring a revolution to classic music television: Instead of airing reality shows, the service intends to bring music back to your TV. While there is an online module, the real goal is to build a Last.fm of videos for your personal home.

From time to time TuneInn is switching languages. Then the blog on music-business presents new developments straight from Europe, in an international perspective.

Music television as it used to be is dead for a long time. The music industry produces tons of videos – many of them  highly expansive – every month. Though there are some on air, most of the programme is filled up with reality shows like “The Hills” or strange dating shows like “Flavor of Love”.

Oliver Koch and Tobias Fröhlich wanted to change that by creating their own, all-new music television. “QTom” combines the classic MTV with the modern benefits of Last.fm: With a few clicks you can adjust your personal channels with your very own interests. But the service, which was launched in September 2009, was not built to conquer your computer. The idea is to get on your home TV, CEO and co-founder Fröhlich tells TuneInn.
Even though QTom has a website, the internet version is kept very simple. The reason for this is, that the whole control is laid-out for the TV’s remote. Whereas you’re used to do several clicks with your mouse, you only want to press a few buttons on your remote control to get to watch the programme you like. With QTom you can create your own music video channel, based on your feeling, favorites and style. The service then recommends new artists, just like Last.fm does it – without video.

Maybe in a few years, Mr Fröhlich explains, when there are several screens on the peoples desks, the time will be right to bring music videos online. But untill then, the main goal is to bring QTom to your TV. Certainly at the moment even the market of TVs with built-in IPTV-functions is quite small, but in a few years every devise will have the ability to stream internet content to the living room. Just like HD took its while to be alomost everywhere, it is pretty easy to imagine that a similar process will be in place for IPTV.

Nevertheless QTom already partners up with Philips (Net-TV), Panasonic (Viera Cast), and is also in talks with LG. The product is quite successful yet: QTom is the No. 2 application, after YouTube, in the German Philips ranking, according to Tobias Fröhlich. That truly is a good start, concerning Tagesschau (Germany’s favorite news show) and BILD (yellow paper with the highest print run in Europe) have applications in place, too.

QTom is making its money with advertising, a premium subscription model is possible in the future. Even if the company already has an editorial department in place, which categorizes every new video with about 100 tags, QTom is quite small yet. The two founders still work at MME (one of the biggest independent producers for TV-content) and are financing the whole project with their very own money. But there is a great potential. We’ll see how QTom will be able to compete against other concepts.