Company Profile

YooMedia plc is one of the fastest growing interactive entertainment companies in the UK.
Since 1997 we have been developing and launching leading B2C consumer brands in the gaming and community sectors. We also work in a B2B capacity with leading brand owners, agencies, content developers and broadcasters to design and develop their interactive content strategies.

Led by Executive Chairman Dr. Michael Sinclair and Group Managing Director Neil MacDonald, YooMedia has assembled a highly experienced management team that possesses a unique blend of skills and experience in the areas of Digital TV, Internet and mobile phone services and technology.

With main office locations in London, Exeter and Maidstone, YooMedia manages core assets including:

Over 30 office locations throughout the UK alone

State-of-the-art studio, production and post-production facilities at our Wapping location.

UK broadcast return path & bandwidth owner

Fully fledged UK Bookmaker License

Database with over 350K UK singles

SMS Engine access with international reach

Fully staffed 50 seat Customer Contact Centre in Maidstone, Kent

YooMedia Dating & Chat - Our dating subsidiary company manages the oldest and largest UK-owned dating brands including Dateline, Club Sirius and Avenues. YooMedia Dating has over 20 office locations throughout the UK and also manages YooChat, our world-leading interactive chat service found on UK digital cable on the Telewest platform (platform extensions planned for 2005).

YooMedia Gambling & Games - Combining the brands of Avago and Channel 425 (in partnership with William Hill) YooMedia is on the leading-edge of interactive fixed odds, casino and poker gambling services for digital TV, the web and 3G mobile phones. Our gaming business also manages YooPlay, the only interactive just for fun games channel found on all four Digital TV platforms in the United Kingdom.

YooMedia Enhanced Solutions (YES) - YES works with brand owners, agencies, content owners and broadcasters to clarify the options, define the strategies and deliver the interactive content that enhances consumer and audience experiences. YES customers include the BBC, Nestle, Celador, William Hill, Channel 4, ZipTV, The Cartoon Network and HR Owen.

YooMedia plc is a UK based interactive entertainment group that manages dating, gaming, games and chat businesses across the core interactive technologies of digital TV, the internet and mobile phone.

Our brands include Dateline, which along with sister brands Club Sirius and Avenues form the UKs largest and most established dating business; FancyaFlutter, one of the leading fixed odds gaming portals on the web and Sky Interactive; YooPlay, the only games channel available on all four UK digital TV platforms; and YooChat, the only interactive TV chat service in the UK.

YooMedia has also pioneered the use of mobile phones for real time audience interaction with TV and radio programmes. Our TriggerTV and Whoosh technologies, which are exclusive to YooMedia and protected by international patents, have been responsible for powering the audience mobile phone component for some of the highest rated programmes on the BBC, ITV, Five, Fox Entertainment and the Cartoon Network.

Our public sector arm, iPublic, has been selected by the government as the only dedicated interactive TV company for the E-voting Framework.

YooMedias partners include Sony Digital, which has a substantial shareholding in the group and a representative on the board.

http://www.whooshgroup.com/rtms/rtms.html

Whoosh have significantly invested in the development of the only high volume cellular messaging and processing platform available in the UK - The RTMS Platform.

With international patents pending, the RTMS Platform is at the core of our offering. It is the first UK cellular infrastructure to allow 1.8 million mobile messages to be processed in any given hour across all national networks.

This massively outstrips the current capacity and overcomes the creative and promotional shackles inherent with such restrictive through-put.

Critically, the RTMS Platform also provides sufficient capacity for huge numbers of alternate data message types such as MMS as well as SMS.

This unique volume proposition allows both brand and media owners to look at the opportunities afforded by mobile messaging in an entirely new way.

This is not new news This is an article penned in the Guardian by the Yoomedia CEO David Docherty from earlier this year.

It gives an excellent vision of the possible future scenarios for iTV in the public sector and also gives a glimpse behind the scenes at the real opportunities in this arena for Yoomedia.

Remember that this was printed before the fundraising, the appointment of Lord Alli and Margaret McDonagh and the acquisition of MMTV. It makes essential reading for anyone serious about investing in YOO who should now consider the implications of David Dochertys vision in the light of the recent acquisition and the NHS contract.

If you were ever in any doubt on how big a part iTV will play in the public sector and how seriously YOO will feature in this future this should help you make up your own mind.


http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,1164165,00.html
What it takes to be a government e-tsar

David Docherty
Monday March 8, 2004
The Guardian

While the race for the next director general of the BBC has been widely covered, the creation of an equally important role in the development of public sector media has gone largely unrecognised. Last week the headhunters Whitehead Mann - who found Mark Thompson for Channel 4, which was helpful given that he wasn't lost - began the task of finding a head of e-government. What's that got to do with public service broadcasting, I hear you yawn? Well, it could change its very face by setting up a rival to the BBC and Channel 4 in their core areas of information and education. And, although they might not realise it, whoever becomes head of e-government has the potential to wield as much media power as the DG.
As we saw from the Elstein report about breaking up the BBC and the manoeuvrings of Channel 4 and Five to create Foive!, the tectonic plates of our broadcasting world are crunching together and creating all sorts of fissures and eruptions. No one is clear what the future holds, but we do know that the internet and interactive TV have challenged the very concept of what good government is, and that governments around the world are pouring hundreds of billions of euros, pounds, dollars and zlotys into responding to their citizens in new ways.
In this country, there have been some visionaries and pioneers in government who have pushed the interactive agenda through the daftness of the hype and the gloom of the despond. Furthermore, the Office of the E-envoy was established to evangelise and coordinate different approaches to the problem. But e-government has had a faltering start, with 2,500 sites scattered and disorganised across the web, and the relatively little-used UK Online on Sky. As the outgoing e-envoy admitted recently, "We are really trying hard to be customer-focused. It's something that government has not done very well in the past."
But there are good signs. Realising the lack of coordination, UK Online is to be replaced by the DirectGov portal (ukonline.direct.gov.uk/homepage) that brings a thematic look to government services and is considerably more audience-focused than its predecessor. And the appointment of the head of e-government, based in the Cabinet Office, could have a profound impact. The problem is that the job is fundamentally focused on IT rather than media, and yet whoever gets it will be commissioning content and services for interactive television.
The role seems aimed at someone at senior partner level at a consultancy such as Accenture or PWC. There is a good precedent for this in the shape of Richard Granger at the Department of Health, who came from Deloitte Consulting, and in little over a year has driven through a 2.3bn tendering process for electronic patient records systems, e-booking and the NHS broadband network. The head of e-government will similarly be asked to drive out costs, free up frontline delivery and automate and integrate back office across the whole of the public services. But, crucially, he or she will be asked to "build services around customers" and develop ways to run interactive e-services on digital TV.
When you put those two thoughts together you realise one of the real problems facing this large-brained individual is how to get the best out of the media. People from big project-focused consultancy companies probably don't watch much TV, and they know as much about running a TV channel as a junior scheduler on QVC. It does not take a genius to run a television service, but it does take a mindset. Doing it well is incredibly hard and requires experience, flair, a total dedication to audiences and creativity. Audiences on digital television are there to watch television. They will only use interactive television if it's (a) fun and entertaining, (b) useful (c) better than an audiovisual alternative.
But success can be achieved. I've launched a lot of TV channels and internet services, but the most successful in terms of audience performance was Telewest's Living Health, an NHS trial in Birmingham, where we managed to get over 40% of the triallists to use the service.
So, getting big audiences to public services can be done, but such services should be commissioned by people who understand media. The government needs something like Sky News's eight-screen interactive channels, instead of isolated experiments with cut-down digital TV information sites. It needs a big, clouty approach to the platforms with a multiplatform, genuinely televisual version of Directgov. Directgov TV should do what television and interactive television do well - namely, provide high quality information, entertainment and learning, with strong interactive hooks and links out to a deep government portal modelled on SkyActive or BBCi.
The government needs a media visionary as well as technology guru if e-government is to fulfil its potential.
David Docherty is chief executive, YooMedia

mac

Many thanks for the recent posts. They succeed in putting some flesh on the bones of the raw announcements from the company and analysts. I'm not sure how many are following the column - YOO retains second spot in the ASOS Challenge Portfolio so there should be readers from there. Any comments anyone?!

In my perspective the share is establishing a new base and may be on a continued up-trend. The first two sharp price rises on positive news in September forced out some volume selling and the share receded. The price rise in early October was presumably 'triggered' by the Shares Play of the Week article. Since then the volume has been low and the price has gradually edged up on low volumes but with buyers outnumbering sellers. The suggested conclusions are: (1) current holders are either long-term or looking for significant gains; (2) there is a trickle of new buyers resulting from recent positive news and/or steady building of positions. The coming week will be interesting. I think a fall is unlikey on this analysis. The share should either settle to a new equilibrium or continue a steady rise. Either option should form a taking-off point for the next really positive news, which, on the basis of recent form, should come in the next month or two and could produce a quite dramatic rise as last December. Then, the announcements were exciting but there was no financial performance basis to carry them through. This year we have the EVO projections which suggest strongly that the share is very much undervalued. A chartist view on these comments would be helpful.

Eric

Eric: Re your request for a view of the YOO chart from a charting perspective. First off it looks bullish. With these small cap shares I always look for end of week closing levels, plus 2 day confirmations of new levels being achieved. YOO has achieved that over the last two weeks, helped by supporting comments in Shares Magazine, and IC although the latter can be the kiss of death! The MACD crossover is +ve as is the rising RSI with no suggestion of being overbought. A possible next resistance point would be around the 30p figure played with last November, once it clears that level it will have 'blue sky' above it!! No Bollinger Band issues in case you are wondering, again all positive. If YOO can continue with some good news flow, and the overall market stays reasonably upbeat, this share could really mark it's place in the ASC Challenge. It seems to me this is a good share with lots of upside. The real question now is the timeframe needed to achive the chosen target! Again difficult to say, but worth a place in anyones portfolio. John

johngtudor

Many thanks for taking the trouble to respond to the request. Many thanks too for the positive reading although I know you well enough by now that you don't pull punches. Agree timetable depends on news flow. Hopefully we won't have to await full year results before the evolution projections are confirmed. I would be surprised if there wasn't good coverage linked to the inevitable striking news of the accelerating digital TV takeover over the Christmas period.
Also worth referring back to the opening post of mactavish - the significance of a sizeable buying volume without news; it does seem that this happenms with some stocks perhaps because of trading relationships. So watch the volume as well as the price.

Eric

Eric: When looking at the YOO chart, I thought the price has a good chance of hitting a 43 - 46p target (the descending line from the high of last year), but the best SL would be the 50day ma. which currently is in the area of 22 - 23p. I normally like a good 1:3 risk/reward ratio, but like you I am flexible with the SL's depending on the news, or other action that caused the SP fallback.

One other issue with smallcap shares is the liquidity, and the ability to acquire or dispose of reasonable parcels...quickly! Have a profitable day!!

John

Another nice price rise today, I have been told that you can only buy 2000 shares online but sell 75,000 so the MM's must be short of shares. Those that have sold today, some have been given 28p which is the mid price. Also a lot more small investors are buying in another good sign as they will be in for the long term. A lot of confidence behind YOO now, after the shares mag article saying that they were dirt cheap, still dirt cheap imho, just waiting for more good news and this should rocket.

One buyer had to pay 29.5p to buy 40,000 which is 0.5p over the offer price of 29p looking good.

FancyaFlutter is YooMedias leading consumer brand in the UK gaming market.

Operating both on Sky Active and the Web, FancyaFlutter features bingo-style fixed odds games that are as much about pure entertainment as they are about winning. With a minimum stake of just 20p, players can win as much as 500,000 on its bingo-style, keno and dice-style games.

FancyaFlutter is constantly developing new titles and exciting competitions. In Spring of 2004 FancyaFlutter struck an agreement with Fremantle Media to create games based on their popular TV titles including Baywatch, Call My Bluff and Blockbusters.

More exciting news followed in August when FancyaFlutter announced it had acquired a license to become an independent bookmaker. This move gives YooMedia and FancyaFlutter room to expand its reach into the UK gaming market and independently develop the infrastructure to support its gaming businesses.

Much of the new FancyaFlutter support infrastructure will be co-located in Maidstone, Kent and sit alongside the YooMedia Dating call centre and support teams,

Key events 2004:

Winter:

Spring:


Summer:


Autumn: YooMedia purchase's FancyaFlutter

FancyaFlutter Licenses Fremantle Media show titles

YooMedia acquires UK bookmaker license

New TV portal to be launched on Sky Active
Transactional Web Site to be launched

Sky piles it high and sells it cheap
BSkyB has lowered the bar for entry into the world of DTV with a new 39.99 all-inclusive package to be sold on supermarket shelves.

This comprises one or two months' included viewing on selected packages plus standard installation of a free Sky box and minidish.

The Sky Starter Pack is hitting the shelves of 1,000 Argos and Woolworth's stores across the UK in good time for Christmas. The launch will be supported by significant in-store marketing activity, national press advertising and listings in each of the retailers' Christmas gift guides.

From November, the offer will be available in around 60 of Tesco's largest "Tesco Extra" format stores.

This is the first time that Sky has packaged its pay-TV product on a full commercial basis in such a way that it can be purchased and offered conveniently as a gift.

All the recipient of the gift need do is call Sky, quote the unique reference number inside each Starter Pack and provide some basic details regarding purchase.

Jon Florsheim, BSkyB's Managing Director, Sales, Marketing and Interactive,said: "The Sky Starter Pack makes our product available in a convenient form through mass-merchandise retailers for the first time."

Yes, gambling is a huge growth sector for the next 10 years, thanks to the deregulation of the gambling industry, currently in the process of being bought forward, as announced by the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell. Through our gambling division 'Fancy A Flutter', Yoomedia recently aquired a fully independant bookmakers license. In time, I expect Yoomedia's gambling products, to expand into a fully operational bookmakers business. Through digital television, the internet and mobile phones.

The final sell trade for the day, was actually above mid price, at 28.05p. Yes, above mid! Have not seen that for a long time.

Yoomedia PLC
19 October 2004




News Release

19 October 2004


YooMedia makes a date with ITVi anytime and Sky Active


YooMedia, the interactive entertainment group, is to offer one of the UK's
best-known dating services to ITV viewers in digital satellite homes, via an
interactive link to its Dateline service within Sky Active. ITV is the UK's
biggest commercial broadcaster and is launching its new ITVi anytime service on
ITV 1 and ITV 2 on Sky this month.

Dateline has already enjoyed success on the Sky Active TV portal, with dating
the second most popular interactive TV service after games. The extension of Sky
Active's services to ITVi anytime will mean that viewers can press the red
button to try out interactive dating from the comfort of their own home. They
can search Dateline's huge online database of lonely hearts by following the
simple on-screen instructions.

The link from ITV's anytime interactive services menu (ISM) will be supported by
cross-promotion from commercial and promotional airtime and eTV applications
that drive viewers directly from relevant programmes to the service
ITV's long association with dating programmes in peak time means it can offer a
specialised mass audience receptive to participating in dating and community
services.

David Docherty, chief executive of YooMedia, said: 'It is great to see ITV
embracing interactive applications for its channels with such enthusiasm and it
is a measure of the pre-eminence of the Dateline brand that we have been chosen
as a partner.'



Further enquiries

YooMedia
David Docherty, chief executive, 020 7462 0870

Powerscourt PR
John Murray, partner, 020 7236 5630

ITV/Sky
Heidi Bruckland, Sky press office, 020 7705 3275



About YooMedia

YooMedia plc is an interactive media group that has built strong, deep content
businesses in the areas of dating, games, gambling and chat across interactive
TV, Internet and mobile communication channels.

Its brands include YooPlay, the only gaming channel available on all four
digital TV platforms; Fancy-a-flutter, one of the leading gambling channels on
the Sky Digital Interactive Platform; and YooChat, the only interactive TV chat
service in the UK. It owns a portfolio of dating agencies, including Dateline,
Club Sirius, Avenues and Simply Love, and has already introduced a Dateline
dating service on Sky Active.

YooMedia has also pioneered the use of mobile phones to interact in real time
with TV and radio programmes. The Trigger TV technology, which is exclusive to
YooMedia and protected by a worldwide patent, has been successfully trialled
with the BBC and Turner Broadcasting.

The group's public sector arm, iPublic, has been selected by the government as
the only dedicated interactive TV company for the E-voting Framework. It also
recently acquired MMTV Limited, which holds the contract to deliver NHS Direct
information via interactive digital television platforms.

YooMedia's partners include Sony Digital, which has a substantial shareholding
in the group and a seat on the board.

YooMedia plc is quoted on the Alternative Investment Market.

About Sky Active

Sky Active can be accessed via the interactive button on the Sky digital remote
control or by pressing the red button whilst watching one of the Sky Channels,
such as Sky One (Sky digital channel 106). One of the key benefits of Sky Active
is that many applications can be accessed while viewers continue to watch their
favourite TV programmes. Over 56% of the UK's 16 million digital satellite users
have pressed the red or interactive button on the Sky remote.




This information is provided by RNS
The company news service from the London Stock Exchange

mactavish: What we need to read now are figures from a recognised body indicating that on-line TV digital services are taking off...better still if it is the areas that YOO are active in!

I agree with you John, perhaps Yoo will issue a trading update but as you say a statement from a recognised body would be better. Still Yoo have now established a platform on ITV which can only be good news with access to more viewers. Now with a foot in the door at ITV who know's what will happen wuth YOO's other products gambling etc.

mactavish: Have you seen any projected figures likely to be earned through these ventures? John

John.

Broker forecast 41m 2005.

This cannot take into account contracts, agreements yet to be announced, not in the public domain. I expect Yoomedia's partnership with ITV and ITVi to be significant and substantial. In particular, a significant contract for Yoomobile in parnership with ITV is now more likely than ever. The launch of ITVi proves ITV are committed to interactive services, recoqnising ongoing development of these services is essential, in driving growth and revenue for their own shareholders. To achieve this objective, they will need partners, one of which is now Yoomedia.

Is is forecast that in two years time, virtualy every television program, will have an interactive element. This is a huge amount of potential business, waiting to be won.


I could send you a copy EVO's research note if you leave your email address.

Hi Eric YOO must be laughing all the way to the bank today what with YOO, ASC and AZM all showing blue, good luck to you mate. Mac.

Why so many sellers dragging the price back I wonder? You'd think theyd want to hang on and see where YOO are going! I know 'T' is market makers - but we need some big buyers coming in now...