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Will the iPhone invigorate the lagging MMS market?
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I've been scratching my head this past week wondering why multimedia messaging service (MMS) and the lack thereof on the iPhone is such a big deal. MMS--the ability to send pictures, videos, audio recordings and other multimedia messages--in general has been a big flop ever since it came to market many years ago (email works pretty well, after all). No one really cared it seems until disgruntled AT&T iPhone users couldn't have it--something that AT&T rectified at about midday on Friday. Someone even filed a lawsuit over the fact that AT&T hadn't enabled it but was misleading users about its availability.
I remember writing a report for a research firm back in 2003, detailing why MMS hadn't taken off like SMS. Some of the problems included interoperability between carriers, complexity of use and the plethora of devices out there that have different formats. A video or picture sent from one device might not be viewable on another device because of different screen sizes.
I did some research to see if anyone else picked up on the irony of MMS on the iPhone. Lo and behold I found an article from Network World that had some statistics from ABI Research. In 2008, MMS made up only 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones globally. ABI expects MMS traffic to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.
So the question is: Will MMS on the iPhone jump-start the MMS market like it changed browsing and application consumption on smartphones?
Incidentally, VeriSign's Messaging and Mobile Media division reached out to me right before the weekend about this very issue. Sonali Shah, director of corporate development and strategy for the division, expects to see an uptick in MMS volume as iPhone users discover the service and use it. But she expects the short-term impact to be small due to the relatively limited penetration of the iPhone. Indeed, sending an MMS messaging is an easy process over the iPhone. It's not so much so on other devices. How many of those iPhone messages sent to non iPhones are being properly rendered? (Perhaps we'll see many complaints in this area that erroneously place the blame on AT&T).
Will it just be a case of iPhone users sending MMS messages to each other? Maybe so, but we know how powerful of a proposition that could be in the long run. Shah believes that "iPhone users serve as a leading indicator of the future of mobile. If these campaigns are successful, brands will increasingly use MMS in innovative ways to drive consumers in stores and online."
In short, other smartphone makers could mimic iPhone's ease-of-use MMS capabilities, or, now that iPhone users have MMS, the novelty soon could wear off. --Lynnette
Comments
Posted by Anonymous | September 28, 2009 - 9:23am
I totally disagree with the author. As a cell phone store manager I deal with customers everyday. The store I manage has AT&T, T-Mobile, & Sprint, and most customers inquire about MMS. They want to make sure that the phone they are getting, no matter how basic can at least receive picture mail. From my older customers who don't have an email address, and want to get pictures of the granchildren, or the younger people who want to post to flikr, facebook, or whatever social networking site they choose to use. The interoperability problems are mostly gone. And with 95% of the phones it is as easy to MMS as SMS. Once again it seems as th iphone will have to "revolutionize" something thats already out, and take credit for it.
Posted by Mat | September 28, 2009 - 12:13pm
I think you are off base and a bit closed minded about MMS. The iphone is hardly the leader in sms and it won't be in mms. The USA seems to be a day late with everything mobile.
http://www.communities.futuretext.com/
and
http://www.tayng.com/magazine/read/from … }_142.html
WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE
And while we're on the internet, you use email, yes? A giant global communication system. There are as many people using email, as there are total fixed landline phones. A very big communication system indeed. But now there is a new kid on the block. I'm not talking about SMS text messaging (that is the biggest data application on the planet, far larger than email, I'll talk about it later). I'm talking about MMS.
MM-what? Picture messaging. MMS the Multimedia Messaging Service that has a potential reach today of over 1.9 billion phones (meaning the phone itself, and the network it is connected to, support MMS picture messaging). If you want to send commercial messages - ie advertising - or news or entertainment content that is of multimedia type (pictures, sounds, videos) then MMS is a system that is out there. It has a reach that is twice as large as the installed base of all computers. And it is 35% bigger than the installed base of television sets. Did I get your attention?
"But nobody uses picture messaging. I don't use picture messaging. Its a stupid technology." Ha-ha, yes, I hear you, but remember how you felt about SMS text messaging just a couple of years ago? Lets examine the evidence, shall we? Nearly half of Asians send picture messages...
..Oops? "Excuse me, Mr Ahonen, what did you say? Did you say nearly half of Asians?" There are 640 million mobile phones in China alone. If half of those send picture messages, then the active MMS user base just in China, is more than the total population of the USA..
Yes, almost half of Asians, 48%, use the MMS messaging system and mostly send and receive picture messages with it. Now, toss in 25% of Europeans who use MMS.. We don't need many older people like you and me, and we don't need many Americans to use MMS picture messaging if we have half of Asians and a quarter of Europeans doing it. The numbers come out at ... drumroll.... suspension rises ... more drumroll... how big will it be... drumrolll.... the active user base of MMS picture messaging is 1.3 billion people today.
Yes. This year 2008 for the first time, there are more active users of MMS picture messaging, than there are active users of email. Still think MMS is not relevant? (Paging the mathematically-challenged in Cupertino.. Apple-a-hoy ! More global users of MMS than email? When will you do the simple math, and add the coupla lines of software code to make your iPhone compatible with the second most used messaging standard on the planet? Yo-hoo, Apple ahoy, anyone awake up there?)
Again lets not misunderstand this. The definition of "active user of MMS" in most networks is someone who sent one MMS in the past month. We're not looking at massive amounts of traffic (yet). But we are looking at enormous reach, and a radical new way to communicate on our phones. If you want to reach an audience and you have a picture or video, you can reach 1.4 billion TV sets, or 1.2 billion email users, or now, you also have the choice of 1.3 billion people who already use MMS multimedia messaging. More than that, in the Developing World, MMS has a far wider reach than TV or the legacy PC based internet. MMS is rapidly becoming a favoured method for mobile advertising for example. We've reported on many examples ranging from Blyk to the BMW winter tyres campaign we discussed earlier.
Posted by Mat | September 28, 2009 - 12:15pm
@ Anonymous I totally agree! I think the author of this post needs to do a bit more research. :)
Posted by Mat | September 28, 2009 - 12:16pm
@ Anonymous I totally agree! I think the author of this post needs to do a bit more research. :)
Posted by Anonymous | September 28, 2009 - 12:52pm
ok, but before roasting the author tell me one reason why someone with an unlimited data plan (on a iphone) should pay another 0.30cent extra for the priviledge of sending a picture, when they can send all the photos they want with email. i get the argument about interop, and no email, but somehow doubt that *free* email accounts are that hard to get...it is broadband/computers that are the limiting factor, and do not see why someone who cannot afford those will be spending on MMS...
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