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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Mon, 17 May 2004 16:56 |
A survey has found that 83 per cent of mobile phone users are yet to send an MMS. Content not messaging now expected to drive MMS usage.
Analysts are at last starting to say that MMS is about content and is not about to replace SMS anytime soon for person-to-person messaging.
A survey, generated by market research company NOP, into mobile phone users in Great Britain on behalf of Sicap questioned 771 people aged 15+. It found that although 65% of respondents had an MMS compatible handset, 17% claimed they didn't know how to send one.
The survey revealed that 21% of mobile phone users have so far sent or received an MMS message. Of this group photo messages of friends and family were the most popular type of service with 78 per cent have sent or received this type of MMS,
MMS is Not SMS+
Speaking at IBC's Global Messaging Congress last week, Philippe Poutonnet, Analyst at Jupiter Research said that MMS traffic won’t eat into SMS traffic. The reality is that email on mobiles is bigger competitor to SMS traffic than MMS he said. The challenge is that while the average price of an SMS is 0.15 euros, an email costs 0.02. An even bigger threat to operators SMS revenues is Instant Messaging on mobiles.
However Mike Grenville from 160 Characters said that "while there will inevitably be new ways of messaging on mobiles, they will be complimentary to SMS rather than replace it as some have claimed."
Poutonnet confirmed Sicap's findings pointing to MMS content as holding more potential than P2P MMS, in contrast to where operators have put their attention so far. A recent study of 3,200 mobile phone users by research firm, Yankee Group, showed that only 24 per cent were interested in video messaging.
MMS Traffic
So far the number of MMS sent by mobile subscribers confirms that users are not seeing MMS as an obvious progression from SMS. Poutonnet showed figures for the number of MMS sent in 2003:
- France 23 Million
- Germany 37 Million
- Italy 20 Million
- Spain 17 Million
- Sweden 5 Million
- Switzerland 450,000
- UK 27 Million
While MMS prices are starting to come down, (O2 reduced its MMS price from 35p a message to 25p in the UK last week), one should not forget that many of these messages were sent while the service was free to users during the introductory launch phase.
MMS Content To Drive Take Up
The Sicap survey found that users are starting to view mobile content with interest finding that 27% had downloaded music clips and 14% sports clips.
Sicap believes that 2004 will be a bumper year for MMS adoption driven by a summer of sport including Euro 2004 and the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. Sicap cite the way MMS adoption in Asia rose on the back of the 2002 football World Cup as evidence for this.
Poutonnet forcast that more than half of European Mobile phone subscribers will have an MMS phone in 2005 which obviously must happen for any hope of usage.
Positioning itself to take advantage of this switch to content driven traffic, Sicap has launched MMS Bulk, a product that enables mobile operators to support the mass delivery of time-critical MMS.
"The findings of our survey highlight that we will still have a lot more to do as an industry to encourage consumers to embrace MMS in the same way as they have SMS," said Per-Johan Lundin, Head of Marketing, Sicap. "The services need to extremely user friendly like Vodafone Live. But the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle is compelling content. Some of this will be generated by users themselves but a lot will need to be generated around the content that consumers are really interested in like sports."
www.globalmessagingcongress.com
www.sicap.com
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