Popular Middle Eastern movies website, TEN Movies, has launched its WAP website on October 5th 2005, which can be found at the internet address < http://movies.theemiratesnetwork.com/wap/ >.
The new WAP service provided by TEN Movies, which is a member website of web-portal The Emirates Network Dot Com (TEN), was developed to make it possible for regional residents to check their local cinema timings directly from their mobile or PDA. “How many times have you been out with friends and then decide that you want to go to the cinema? Stopping at the nearest Internet café to check the cinema timings online or calling the cinema by phone isn’t very convenient. The most convenient means would be to have access to all the local cinema timings from your mobile,” said Yousuf Philips, CEO of TEN.
When most mobiles made in recent years have WAP capabilities, very few people with a mobile won’t be able to take advantage of TEN Movies’ WAP service. Mobile users only need to subscribe to their GSM provider’s WAP service and then browse their way to TEN Movies’ WAP service address. “Subscribing to WAP in the Emirates can easily be done by calling 125 and you are only charged for the time you are browsing, which is around 25-30 fils per minute. Even after disconnecting from WAP, the pages visited are still stored on the mobile, which means that they can be looked through again without reconnecting to WAP,” said Ahmed Mustafa, Assistant Operations Manager of TEN Movies.
Yousuf went on to say, “We have been continuously working on improving our movie resource to better suit the needs of our visitors, since we initially launched UAEFilms.com in 2001. Since that time, UAEFilms.com was transformed into TEN Movies in August 2004, and began to cover cinemas throughout the Middle East. Three months later, TEN Movies launched its Arabic version, which was a huge success with the online Arabic speaking community. We also introduced Flash movie trailers using Flip Media’s Flipcast service, which makes it possible to watch movie trailers without the need of external media players like Windows Media Player and Quicktime.”
