Why MMS will fail

Andy Caddy Mobile operators expectations of MMS is soaring: hoping to repeat the success of SMS they dream of higher revenues driven by adoption of content rich messaging. But there are a number of compelling reasons why MMS will not be widely adopted as well as the prospect of multiple alternatives.

So much for SMS, what of MMS it's feature rich older brother that is being touted as the next big thing? There are a number of very compelling reasons why this will not be the revenue saviour that the mobile operators are looking for.

Because it's not SMS version 2
SMS was buried in phone operating systems and was often difficult to use yet it became a mass medium because it provided a simple and effective communication medium : point and shoot. Type in message, fire at phone number. Easy. Following the growth of email popularity in the mid nineties, SMS provided a simple messaging solution for the common man.

MMS, on the other hand, is borne of marketing meetings who's sole purpose is to think up ways to drive up the arpu for the mobile carriers. But sending pictures, sounds or video from your phone is inherently a more complex task. It implies a storage of the assets or the production of them (camera, voice recorder etc). This introduces extra steps in the point and shoot process and make the transaction longer and far less appealing. So lets think where these files might come from : you might record a voice message and send it. Well, really that's just voice mail isn't it? You could download pictures from your PC, but that misses the point a bit. Maybe from another device? OK, let's just say we're all Bluetoothed up. Maybe your video camera sends a clip to your phone. Maybe your video camera IS your phone. Now it's going to send the clip you have just taken to another phone number without any user settings, configuration required - yeah, right. As the complexity of the service increases, so will the required operating system of the phone and this gets away from the fundamental simplicity of a phone.

Moreover, why would you want to send these files? Yes, there may be a market for sending photos as digital cameras become the norm, but how often? Weekly? Daily? Hourly? Try this test - look through your last 20 text messages and ask yourself how many would have been enhanced by sound or vision. Now look through your last 20 sent emails and see how often you do this in practice...on a stable platform... where it's easy to attach pictures. My guess it won't be many and certainly not enough to sustain a market.

Because it's push technology
Heard of Pointcast? Probably not. In 1995 they were the next big thing - offering personalised information streams direct to the internet browser that the user subscribed to. It was such a sensation that Microsoft panicked and built "Channels" (pretty much the same thing) into Internet Explorer 4. Internet Explorer 4 came with pretty much every version of Windows since 95, yet have you ever used a channel? Thought not. The problem with these technologies is that the companies involved got so excited by the prospect they forgot to ask the end user.

If, so far, we have assumed that MMS files come from the phone/device, then another proposal of MMS is subscription services where users select clips to be sent to their device (e.g Saturday's goals from the Premiership). Sound familiar? It's push reinvented. Such a service would require extensive support web sites to drive the content intelligently and would need the user to get to them, navigate around them, set up the service and subscribe. This is a daunting task for the average SMS user and requires substantial investment from the companies that are going to build these services. And while we are at it, who are going to build these interactive services? The same companies who got burnt by WAP or perhaps the ones that were involved in the collapse of terrestrial digital TV?

Personalised content sent direct to the handset seems tantalising but it will over engineer the end user experience and the take up will not be high. Technology loving soccer fans represent a very small demographic.

Because it's too many immature technologies
OK, so what device are we talking about? The PDA market won't generate the volume's of MM's required and the current average phone screen is just too small to be practical. The converged phone/PDA? Well, after 2 years of attempts the jury is still out on that one. In a country where mobile fashion far out-markets mobile function, it's going to take some time before the true super phone converged device evolves.

And let's just park that small hurdle for a moment and talk about audio video standards, or rather the lack of them. If you want to send a sound or video clip you simply have to compress it or the file becomes too large and the wait to send, too long. On the internet there are many competing standards - Quicktime, Real Networks, DivX and Microsoft's own Windows Media format. How will this translate for MMS? If this is going to be a simple end user experience then you can't be dealing with installing software to view Aunt Cecil's holiday video. It has to arrive, you click, it displays. No more complex than a TV or the users will not use it. We are a long way from this level of simplicity.

And none of this takes into account the 3G networks. These all have to be ready at the same time so that one MMS user can send a message to any other MMS user. We learnt that from the SMS boom which was only enabled when all users could send to all other users.

So a huge co-ordinated investment in telco infrastructure has to be in place at the same time as a multi function phone/PDA evolves at the same time as an efficient and agreed audio video standard is developed.

Because it won't attract the porn market
Porn is the dark seedy side of the entertainment industry that no one likes to talk about, yet it has fed the growth of the home video market in the 80's and the internet in the 90's. The need to drive modem speeds up and transfer times down has to some degree come about through the proliferation of porn on the web. Porn on your mobile? That's just not a viable option - quite apart from the screen size, it's going to be a very small market that wants to be indulging their one handed hobby on the go.

Because phone based email will supersede it
Compared to almost-free email, MMS is expensive and this fact will be increasingly apparent tas email equipped phones start to appear on the market. The technology to allow message composition, addressing and attachments will be exactly the same for both mediums, thus the choice for the end user will be in the transport mechanism, and if faced with the choice of expensive vs almost free, it is clear which option will be more attractive.

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