In late March I attended the MMS Congress 2007 in Munich. This was one of the better conferences I have been to as there was strong operator representation and even the vendor presentations were reasonably constrained in their product marketing. The organisers had also put together a good agenda structure that had a strong logical flow.
There were three distinct focus areas in the operator case study presentations:
- A2P MMS: What types of content and services are being delivered via MMS (voice mail, email, alerts, sports, etc),
- P2P MMS: What is being done to encourage and stimulate P2P MMS (push stimulation campaigns, marketing/promotion, price elasticity, user education)
- P2A MMS: Emerging Mobile 2.0 applications such as photo blogging/sharing, citizen journalism, competitions, etc
My conclusion is that we need to be doing all of the above in order to offer something of interest to as many subscribers as possible so they start using MMS in the first place and then keep using it in different ways.
For example, a presenter from an operator in the Middle East has 70% of MMS traffic being A2P as they use it to deliver all content to subscribers. He believe this in turn teaches people about MMS and they start using it P2P.
All presenters agreed on the need to get the basics right. Maybe we are spoiled in Australia but many markets still have significant issues with non-delivery of MMS, especially between carriers. They say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression and this is particularly true for new technology. I'm sure there are many subscribers who got their new camera phone, took a picture, sent it to a friend or family member only to have it disappear into the aether...
Another key theme from the conference was the need to start thinking of MMS as a bearer for other applications and services as well as a P2P messaging technology. For example, one operator has launched a voice mail service which delivers each recorded message via MMS rather then requiring the subscriber to dial in.
This as a number of great advantages including:
- The sending number for MMS is the phone number of the person leaving the voicemail. This means you can immediately see who the voicemail was from including their name if it is in your address book.
- You only need to listen to the messages you want to rather than having to go through all of your voice mails in chronological order.
- Your storage of messages is only limited by the handset and not the operator's message deletion policy.
- It is easy to reply with a message, call the sender or even forward the message to someone else through the existing messaging functionality of the handset
- Messages are deliver via best effort packet data reducing the demand on voice channels in the network
The moral of the story is that all operators have invested a lot of time and money into getting MMS to where it is today and it is now time to start generating a return on that investment!
