MMS - Recognizing the obvious

Mike Greenville from 160characters.org has a great article about how MMS is finally coming into its own and being recognized as a great delivery mechanism for rich multi-media content as part of e-commerce, marketing and advertising.

When MMS was initially launched it was thought to be ultimate revenue source for operators to recapture the revenue investment in 3G licenses. And as such the entire market was put under huge pressure to perform. The analysts and the reporters were put on-notice that they had to do everything they could to make MMS big.

Another aspect of MMS which is often overlooked is that it was born out of the success of picture messaging in Japan. The NTT Docomo ShaMail service was the first instance of consumers sending and receiving photos via their mobile phone. And if it was big in Japan then it must also be big in every GSM network in Europe. NOT!

I'm not sure what these guys were smoking, but it must have been some really good stuff.

1) The GSM networks decided that rather than follow the Japan model of mobile IMAP access to e-mail that they would develop their own standard and call it MMS. Think about it - if GSM networks hadn't suffered from the dreaded NIH (not-invented-here) disease we would have had e-mail access via our mobile phone as early as 2001! Only now are people realising the possibility of having access to e-mail via mobile as a true revenue driving opportunity.

2) Photography is popular in Europe - but when was the last time you saw a bus load of German's wandering around the Eiffel tower with no less than 3 cameras hanging from their necks. It might be a politically incorrect generalisation - but you get the message. Europeans are not nearly so photo-centric as the Japanese and this means the demand for photos was far less.

3) The MMS standard required that every message go through some level of transcoding to ensure the best display on the destination device. Transcoding is a non-exact science which at best can cause distortion and at worst can make a certain fast food chain's golden arches show up green and squashed. The ShaMail service simply delivered an e-mail with a photo attachment and left it up to the device how best to display the resulting picture.

So what is changing?

The big change is that operators have realised that person to person MMS will never be a significant amount of the MMS traffic on their networks and instead they are focusing on how to optimize the channel for use by 3rd parties as a content delivery channel. This means addressing the transcoding problems, improving 3rd party access for delivery and adjusting the pricing model to one which is comparable to SMS to encourage advertisers to take advantage of rich multi-media content delivery.

In short - they are starting now - in 2007 - what they should have been doing in 2002. Well better late than never --- but better never late.