.... but this piece of analysis/spin/marketing made me grin.
"MMS can be seen as a very popular and successful service"
... on the basis that people are now using it occasionally. (Even me, since it seems to have a decent user experience on my new phone).
Just a shame that operators have subsidised something like a billion cameraphones to the tune of around $10-20 a piece (apparently about $9 for the camera module and then a bunch of bits of software & integration work), plus had to invest $XXbn in MMSCs and other bits of infrastructure, and $YYbn in developing & marketing their photo messaging services.
It's pretty difficult to get any reliable stats on MMS traffic, but the anecdotal evidence I've seen points to a maximum of around 150-200m being sent globally per month (excluding the exceptional-as-usual Japanese). Verizon's one of the leaders, at 62m per quarter (ie 21m per month), while another big advocate Telecom Italia Mobile made a grand total of €49m from MMS in 2005. Scaling that up means MMS is (optimistically) a $2bn business in 2006.
Yeah, great success, given a cumulative investment of the order of $20bn+
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
I particularly like:
ReplyDelete"Here in Europe, current adoption levels for MMS are higher than for any other application except voice and SMS"
Which is either spectacularly disingenuous or demonstrates a serious misunderstanding about the industry.
On a related note, Vodafone customers will now know that MMS is being dropped from Voda's "Extras" package, as Big Red realised its not worth giving something away for almost nothing when nobody values it.