Advertising and social networking the sparks to reignite MMS

Amidst all the hype about the mobile internet, MMS has often been the forgotten prodigal son. However, by focusing on MMS as a multimedia channel to enable content and services, Derek McElhinney, product marketing manager, Acision, argues that it’s time has now come.

Seven years on from the first MMS deployment, MMS can be looked upon as a mature service that is benefiting from the explosion of mobile data services and our increasingly networked society.

MMS may have got off to a slow start following its launch in 2002, but traffic is now starting to take off. Factors such as a lack of capable handsets, poor network capabilities – GPRS was only in its infancy at launch – and a bad user experience stunted its early growth.  However, the situation has changed radically with analysts predicting a steady increase in MMS traffic of more than 20% between 2007 and 2013, resulting in operators continuing to give the channel due investment.

Although the tipping point seems to have been reached, MMS still hasn’t entrenched itself as a regular element in users’ communications armoury. Much of its use is confined to special occasions such as New Year’s Day or Valentine’s Day; and it lags far behind SMS as a daily communications tool. Nevertheless, a series of factors are coming together to stimulate usage and help operators widen the scope of MMS beyond standard person-to-person communications.

Getting the basics right

From a device point of view, MMS-capable handsets are now cheaper and more widely available than ever before in both developed and developing markets. Consumers can therefore now send messages without the need to worry whether or not the recipient has a capable device. Interestingly, the demand for and subsequent inclusion of MMS capability in the iPhone, as well as other smartphones suggests there is plenty of life left in MMS.

Faster and more reliable mobile networks and MMS systems that offer new functionality and features such as subscriber auto-provisioning, inter-operator messaging and legacy handset support have increased user satisfaction.

Interoperability issues between operators have also largely been resolved; so the limiting factor of only being able to send MMS messages to users on the same network has now been consigned, in the most part, to history. In addition, consumers are now familiar with the service and operators are promoting initiatives to stimulate usage (particularly to encourage customers to jump the first-time use hurdle); like free MMS weekends and photo competitions.

Growth must come from service innovation

With these device and technology fundamentals in place, operators can now focus on mass adoption and growth.  The youth segment is key here, and many operators are building up this base by implementing reduced prices and message bundles. For real growth, however, MMS needs to be associated with service innovation. This can be done by utilising the multimedia channel to address three key areas: personal messaging, commercial messaging and social messaging.

Personal messaging involves users sending messages to each other; however, person-to-person messaging is an under exploited market for innovative value added services. Examples that can enhance the personal messaging experience include pushing voicemails via the MMS channel; or utilising SMS to drive MMS traffic by converting SMS messages into multimedia messages, for example adding avatars and signatures.

The content, advertising and media industries see MMS as a powerful distribution channel for commercial messaging due to the rich capabilities MMS offers. Brand logos and jingles can be added to MMS advertisements as well as the ability to include longer text strings than SMS can allow. Analyst firm Juniper Research has reported that advertising-funded MMS revenues are set to hit US$87 million by 2014 as the medium gains traction as an advertising channel.

Social messaging, which enables group messaging to the internet or social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, as well as social activities like gaming, are also set to increase MMS usage and revenues. The increased use of social networking over the mobile internet lends itself neatly to multimedia messaging - a corollary benefit of social networking uptake is that users are far more willing to share images and content; and MMS, with its rich capabilities, is ideally positioned to serve that need.

Increased demand requires platform resilience

However, this growth presents operators with a challenge. Many launched their MMS systems more than five years ago, so their hardware is reaching the end of its lifespan and/or support contract.

Many operators are also seeking to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their MMSCs and reduce the operational expenditure burden of high cost end-of-life systems.

Replacement systems will also need to demonstrate reduced hosting costs, including cooling and power consumption for their servers. Blade server technology is one solution to address this demand, as it saves operators expenditure on datacentre floor space, too.

For many mobile brands, cost reduction also means being able to host multiple operators on one central platform. Many operator groups want to consolidate their messaging architecture within the group; plus mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) need to be catered for.

Cost of operations isn’t the only issue that new systems need to address. Many first-generation systems were designed without an appreciation of the high volume of push messages necessary to support MMS advertising or campaign traffic. This type of traffic requires high throughput capacity at specific times of the day, or in extreme bursts. Typically a system carrying campaign traffic running an average throughput of tens of messages per second may in fact need to handle hundreds of thousands of messages within a short timeframe. Tomorrow's systems will need to be able to cope with that variance in load.

Acision MMSC: second generation MMS support

Acision offers an MMSC that is designed to meet these new operator requirements. The Acision MMSC is compliant with all the Open Mobile Alliance and 3GPP specifications and has been the MMSC of choice for operators in every region of the world. Acision delivers scalable reliable systems, available on Blade and other server types, which are capable of handling thousands of messages per second while reducing the total cost of ownership for operators. On top of this reliable hardware, Acision has deployed a multimedia messaging service that provides rich functionality to increase user satisfaction and enable service innovation.

The functional benefits of MMS, in that it can be used to send and receive photos, music, e-mails and voicemails remain similar to the way they were defined at the outset. However, with the support of a resilient infrastructure, MMS is now a demystified, mature service capable of bridging the divide between mobile subscribers, content providers, advertisers and internet services.