Struggling to shore up decreasing revenues from voice usage, U.S. carriers agreed last October to a set of messaging guidelines they said would allow them to be MMS-interoperable by the end of 2004.
While the target date is long past, it appears they’re now getting close to their goal-and it’s paying off.
Increasing interoperability between carriers seems to be driving uptake of some peer-to-peer MMS applications. Content usage measurement firm M:Metrics found that photo messaging among U.S. wireless users increased nearly 5 percent in March, even as other applications suffered post-holiday declines. Almost 13 million users sent a photo from their handsets to another phone or e-mail address, the report found.
“Consumers are responding positively to the relatively new ability to send photos across carrier networks,” said Mark Donovan, an MMetrics senior analyst. “Clearly, interoperability will facilitate the growing trend in the use of photo messaging.”
Tellingly, the largest number of users sending photo messages from phone-to-phone were between the ages of 25 and 34-a bit older than the target demographic of “early adopters” in their late teens and early 20s. And the application is gaining traction among older subscribers, too, with users between 35 and 44 growing at a consistent 20-percent clip from the last three months, according to M:Metrics.
Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and Verizon Wireless-the nation’s two largest carriers-announced interoperability two months ago, and T-Mobile USA Inc. is interoperable with Cingular and Sprint Corp. While Nextel Communications Inc. is not currently MMS-interoperable with other carriers, interoperability is “a top priority in development,” according to the company.
With more consolidation on the way among the Tier 1 carriers, it seems likely all major U.S. operators will be MMS-interoperable by the end of the year.
Some liken MMS uptake to the early days of SMS, citing the interoperability agreements of 2003 as key to driving text-messaging usage. “Once there was interoperability (with SMS), there was tremendous growth,” Comverse Chief Technology Officer Andrew Wulff said earlier this year.
Still, while some claim 2005 will be the year applications like photo messaging take off, interoperability is only one hurdle facing carriers looking to cash in on data-heavy peer-to-peer applications. While nearly every handset on the market supports text messaging, far fewer phones are capable of creating, sending and receiving multimedia messages. Also, like many applications on sophisticated handsets, sending photos or video clips can be cumbersome for subscribers accustomed to doing little more than talking on their phones.
“The handset usability is getting better,” said Glenn Kiladis, director of marketing for LogicaCMG’s North American operations. “It used to take 15 or 16 clicks to send an MMS message; that’s now down to three or four or five. And as that number decreases, the uptake will increase.”
The vast number of handsets on the market presents a problem as well. Just as games and other content must be ported to fit each model on every carrier, multimedia content like photos and video clips may need to be modified to re-create accurate sound and images. Even messages sent between interoperable carriers may not be delivered if the transcoding is done incorrectly, Kiladis said.
“A perfect example is when a more advanced Sony Ericsson handset takes a large image and sends it to a (less sophisticated) phone,” Kiladis explained. “That MMSC (multimedia messaging service center) needs to be what they call `device aware,’ so that when it delivers the message to that person, the onboard transcoder scales down the image.”
While MMS is doubtlessly on the rise, whether it can duplicate the dramatic uptake among U.S. users of text messaging will depend on far more than just interoperability agreements. Like SMS, photo messaging and other applications must be simple, accessible and dependable, said Kiladis.
“The industry as a whole needs to reduce complexities and increase simplicity. … At the end of the day, if you can deliver content that people are willing to pay a dollar or two dollars for, there is a very good opportunity for the operator.
