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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Fri, 24 Dec 2004 13:42 |
Despite the increased take-up of camera phones, MMS usage is currently in decline. Can operators and handset manufacturers reverse the downward spiral or do they have another WAP on their hands?
The reality is worryingly different. Just as MMS celebrated its second birthday, Continental Research published a report which found that the number of users sending a photo a day via MMS had declined from 8% in 2003 to only 3% in 2004.
Continental’s figures are no ‘one off’ blip. As John Delaney, an analyst at Ovum, explains: “MMS messages sent per month are very low – on average two to three per user per month. It’s not generating even a fraction of what SMS is in revenue.†At a time when camera-phones are flying off the shelves (180M will be sold world-wide this year) MMS usage should be increasing, yet it seems stuck in reverse.
The challenge for the mobile industry is to work out where MMS lost its way.
Are you receiving me?
Perhaps the first challenge for MMS is reliability. Sports photo marketing agency Empics has run a series of technology trials that spotlight the reliability problems of MMS all too clearly. When sending picture alerts to football fans, MMS proved highly unreliable offering only a 60% success rate.
Bad casting
The transfer of high-quality photos may be marketed as one of the benefits of MMS but, unfortunately, the technology was never actually designed to play this role.
MMS was designed to send photos (and other multi-media) from one phone to another. Because phones have small displays, and the early camera-phones had low-resolution cameras, there was no point in sending high-resolution photos from one phone to another. For this reason MMS was designed around sending 30KB-sized images from phone to phone – a limit that has been increased to 100KB on some, but not all, networks.
Fast forward to today where megapixel camera-phones are producing 300KB images and one manufacturer has announced a 5 mega-pixel camera-phone that will produce 1.5Mb images and it is clear that these images will need to be heavily compressed to fit into the MMS size limitations.
Never mind the quality
Why does image size matter? Because as megapixel camera phones enter the market, consumers will want to store, share and print the high quality images they take on their phones.
However in recent tests using Nokia’s new 7610 megapixel handset, the resolution of photos sent via MMS was reduced by a factor of 50 when they were compressed to fit into the 30KB MMS limit. The result is a low quality image that most online photo albums refuse to print. The disappointment for users could blight the take-up of megapixel camera-phones.
As easy as 1,2,3,4,5,6…
The other big problem for MMS is ease of use. On most camera-phones it can take a least 10 key presses to send a photo with MMS, hardly the best recipe for ease-of-use and mass-market adoption. Are users really going to press an extra 10 keys each time they take a photo?
Raising the limits
To improve the quality of images sent, some Operators are upgrading their MMS gateways to handle 300 KB photo with talk of further increases in the future.
This upgrade is relatively simple to perform in the network but will need to be industry-wide to allow users to send images between networks. In a case of wireless déjà vu, the industry finds itself facing the same obstacle of interoperability that handicapped the original launch of MMS.
But raising the limit to 300KB is not enough even today. Megapixel camera-phones often produce 320KB images today and the 300KB limit will be totally inadequate for the 2 mega-pixel camera-phones that are already shipping and the 5 mega-pixel camera-phones that will ship next year.
To make matters worse the MMS gateway limit is only part of the problem. Mega-pixel camera-phones today default to sending 30KB MMS since this is guaranteed to work on all networks. Users can change this setting to 100KB if they can find the right menu option on the phone, but camera-phones today don’t even offer a 300KB option as there are so few networks able to support it.
Brighter horizon
Though MMS capacity limitations persist, some Operators are making it easier for consumers to print images straight from a phone’s memory card at digital print kiosks in their stores. Some Operators have also launched MMS postcard services.
Most significantly a clutch of photo processing retailers, including mail order heavyweight Bonusprint, have started to offer mobile services that allow consumers to upload mega-pixel images to their online photo albums with a single key press on their handsets.
This service uses sophisticated data replication software that simplifies and ‘turbo charges’ the MMS experience on handsets running the latest Symbian, Microsoft, and Palm OS operating systems. Using this system the number of photos uploaded from camera phones to online albums increased 14 fold.
Into the future
Over the next few years, new services like blogging, group messaging, dating and competitions may increase application-to-person traffic and in turn drive MMS usage.
However, it is the ever-increasing functionality of camera-phones that provide the biggest opportunity in this space as the boundaries between the camera-phone and digital camera markets blur.
The trend in camera-phones is towards designs that look more like a traditional camera from behind and a phone from the front. Optical zooms are also now beginning to appear in these phones. Combining these phones with seamless photo storage, sharing and printing – delivered by Bonusprint-style services – will mean the modern camera-phone will quickly replace all but the highest-end digital cameras.
Users will then always have their camera-phones with them – allowing them to capture all those moments when before they used to say, “if I only had a cameraâ€.
By Simon East, CTO and Founder of effortless mobile services company Cognima
www.cognima.com
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