Wireless companies hype multimedia messaging

Hoping to cash in on the profitability of short message service in Europe, seven vendors and mobile application developers today announced the creation of an initiative to push standards the next generation of SMS, multimedia messaging service.

Started by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, CMG, Comverse and Logica, the MMS initiative’s goal is to promote the use of 2.5G and 3G multimedia media messaging and educate the masses on the technology’s capabilities. Aside from that stated goal, the organization painted a very muddled explanation of its purpose.

During a conference call today, the representative companies stressed that the initiative was not an alliance or partnership of any sort, that it was not a decision-making or a standards body, and that all of the member companies would continue to develop, manufacture and market the wireless multimedia products independently.

The companies even balked at the word “member.” When asked if other companies could join the MMS initiative, a Siemens representative said allowing new companies into its ranks was “not really relevant,” because the organization had no membership.

MMS is viewed as the extension of enhanced messaging service (EMS), a technology that got its own initiative last month. EMS adds simple multimedia functionality--bit-mapped images and simple audio--to SMS text messaging, while MMS is intended to be leap forward in wireless multimedia, offering video, high quality sound and other rich content, according to the MMS initiative “participants.”

Both technologies are in the standards process with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the WAP Forum, which is exactly where the MMS initiative wants them to stay,

While standards will be left to the standards groups, the initiative companies said they want to avoid the mistakes made in promoting previous technologies, making veiled references to the hype surrounding Bluetooth and WAP that led to consumer disappointment.

A spokesman for CMG said the initiative would help “interpret” the MMS standard for the public, clarifying the technology’s capabilities and when it will become commercially available. The MMS initiative hope that it can bring the technology to the market sooner and with greater consumer acceptance, he said.

“Influencing the market is very important at this stage,” the CMG spokesman said.

While vendors may be treading carefully around multimedia messaging’s prospects, few can blame them. So far, SMS has been the only technology outside of Japan to win widespread market acceptance. While WAP flounders and 3G network deployments fall behind schedule, current-generation SMS technology is experiencing a minor revolution in Europe.

The GSM Association estimates 15 billion SMS messages were sent in December 2000 and 50 billion in the 1st quarter of 2001. So far, it is one of the few data services that have generated profits for carriers, which hope to expand their earnings by expanding the capabilities of short messaging via MMS.