The potential of MMS

After years of languishing, multimedia messaging service is picking up in the U.S. According to numbers from two different mobile industry trackers, the last few quarters have seen double-digit surges in picture messaging usage, giving the industry its first sign of encouragement that the nascent application might have life in it after all

But as a percentage of overall messaging traffic, MMS falls leagues short of its simple-text predecessor SMS, and even pales compared to newer push e-mail services flourishing among business users. Though industry officials are pleased to see MMS making progress, most acknowledge picture messaging will only go so far. What's important to remember, however, is that MMS is more than just picture messaging. Now that its initial file-sharing capabilities have been unlocked through digital photo sharing, carriers can now pursue the more ardent task of building a set of services around MMS that go far beyond sending a mere JPEG file to another phone or e-mail address. Other multimedia formats wait in the wings as does the promise of MMS as a content-delivery vehicle.

“If we just look at picture messaging, we know it will always be two or three orders of magnitude below text messaging,” said James Colby, chief marketing officer for the Americas for application vendor Comverse. “We have to start thinking of MMS as much more than just a messaging enabler. It's a commerce enabler.”

MMS's recent success is the culmination of several factors, some of which have been gelling in the industry for years and some of which are very recent actions by the carriers.

Camera phones have proliferated rapidly in the last few years, and even some of the more basic starter phones from carriers have the ability to take a decent picture. Most of the operators have entered into cross-carrier interoperability agreements, which along with the penetration of camera phones, offer a reasonable assurance that a photo sent to a handset will reach its recipient.

But both those factors have been in play since 2005. Carriers themselves began to kick-start the industry this year by re-evaluating their pricing models. Both Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile have begun bundling text messaging and picture messaging together, taking away the price sensitivity surrounding sending an individual photo missive. The result has been sizable uptakes in both carriers' MMS traffic, said Seamus McAteer, chief product architect and senior analyst for M:Metrics. According to its latest survey results, 19% of T-Mobile's customer base now uses photo messaging on occasion, and 16% of Verizon Wireless's customers do the same.

Furthermore, picture-messaging usage has been growing at a high single-digit rate across the carriers every month since the beginning of the year. Among the industry itself, there may still be a perception that MMS is languishing, but among wireless customers, there's genuine excitement surrounding the service, McAteer said.

“The idea that MMS isn't succeeding is just wrong,” he said. “Photo messaging is now the second most popular data service after text messaging and has the steepest growth trajectory. … Those 2005 investments in MMS weren't wasted. It just took a while for the network effects to take hold. Now we're in a period of fairly rapid growth.”

The prep work the industry has put into picture messaging will also give it a leg up when it comes time to deploy more advanced services. The MMS infrastructure is already in place, the interoperability connections are already live and the multimedia handsets are already in customers' hands, McAteer said — any new multimedia service — like voice, video or animation — requires mainly transcoding work.

But MMS's progress must be viewed with reservations. Although a greater percentage of the public is becoming accustomed to MMS, it doesn't have the huge adoption curve of SMS and it doesn't mean that individual customers are sending the picture messages as often as they are sending text messages. According to Tamara Gaffney, Telephia product director and analyst, 11% of all U.S. wireless customers paid to ship or receive a picture message in the second quarter. But the amount of customers who are subscribing to a picture message monthly bucket is only 1%. That's partly explained by carriers bundling SMS and MMS together, which has driven usage of picture messaging up, but as of the end of June, only 6.8% of customers subscribed to such a bundle, and in the case of T-Mobile, new SMS packages include MMS regardless of whether a customer uses picture messaging or not. Bottom line, Gaffney said, more people are getting accustomed to MMS, but its overall growth is nothing compared to SMS.

“The use of the camera on the device is increasing, but people are keeping those photos on the phone,” Gaffney said. “They're not using the phone to send those photos through the network. If there was going to be some big cultural shift toward using picture messaging, it would have happened by now.”

If an individual user sends only a few photo messages a month, compared with hundreds of text messages, what's to make the industry think they'd send more than a few video or embedded voice messages? There's not much reason to expect that, and it's why MMS has to quickly evolve away from the peer-to-peer model, Comverse's Colby said.

The compelling services will be based on application-to-peer and peer-to-application models, Colby said. For instance, Kodak is using technology that will allow a customer on vacation to send a photo instantly to a Kodak server, which will print the photo on high-quality paper stock and then mail it as a physical postcard to all of the people in a customer's address book. There are European entertainment and promotion companies that are using MMS as a way to send tickets or exclusive party invitations by sending a barcode in an MMS payload that can be scanned at the door. And there are innumerable news and information outlets that have built businesses on e-mail newsletters looking for a more robust format to send their wares directly to the mobile phone, Colby said.

While individually none of the services would likely overshadow peer-to-peer MMS, collectively they could create a message load that would dwarf user-to-user traffic. MMS could become less a service unto itself rather than the underlying protocol that powers a host of services, from application delivery to interactive alerts to push-to-browse content. Music companies could use MMS to deliver video promotional clips and song previews on request while embedding links to WAP sites where users could purchase the related song or CD. News and sports organizations could send breaking news alerts that contain actual footage. Application-to-peer services that are uninspiring when delivered over SMS could be quite provocative and intriguing when the capabilities of a robust multimedia platform are added.

All of these services, however, have large technical and regulatory barriers to surmount before they're ready for commercial service, and according to one company, the barriers are just too high. Bango CEO and founder Ray Anderson said MMS content delivery is simply too complicated logistically.

As a third-party content distributor, Bango is in the business of finding any conceivable channel to get paid content in front of prospective customers and all of its attempts to exploit MMS for that purpose have failed. First, a content provider needs to know the make, model and capabilities of every handset to which a multimedia file is being sent, which is impossible data to collect and manage. In areas like the U.S., where almost all handset purchases and exchanges are handled by the carrier, a content provider could feasibly partner with an operator. But in Europe and many other areas of the world where a customer is merely purchasing a SIM card while handsets remain interchangeable, there's no way a distributor could reliably ensure a customer received the content for which he or she just paid, Anderson said. Furthermore, MMS billing would become a nightmare as customers move in and out of networks, facing different tariffs and roaming fees, all of which would be absorbed by the customer.

“MMS is useless for content providers,” Anderson said. “It just doesn't work for the purposes content providers need it.”

Another issue is the network itself. The current MMS infrastructure is designed to handle small amounts of simultaneous traffic and deal with the relatively small payload of a peer-to-peer picture messaging, said Shaili Jain, CEO of Adamind, a software company that specializes in transcoding between MMS formats. A peer-to-peer messaging service distributes the bulk of messages throughout the day, so any given MMS center (MMSC) is handling more than a handful of messages simultaneously. But MMS blasts — say team scores or news alerts — would flood the network with thousands of messages simultaneously. The current infrastructure wasn't designed to handle that kind of traffic, Jain said.

Then there is the matter of transcoding these new multimedia formats. The industry spent years trying to work the kinks out — getting a photograph taken on one phone to render on the screen of another. Not only will new content services deal with more robust multimedia, they'll have to sort through the hundreds of different handset formats, each of which renders a multimedia message slightly differently.

While those obstacles are significant, most people in the industry believe they can be overcome. In truth, they have to be overcome — the wireless world doesn't have many other options for multimedia delivery.

“What it's got in its favor is that it's the only way to deliver rich media like a picture or short video to hundreds of different handsets,” said Martin Dunsby, Openwave senior vice president and manager of the vendor's global services division.“MMS is absolutely here to stay.”