Multimedia messaging (MMS) has been overhyped and analysts need to be more realistic in making revenue predictions, says a new report from the Wireless World Forum (W2F).
MMS represents the next generation of mobile messaging and involves the transfer of text, sounds, images and video between handsets. Some industry observers have forecasted that annual revenues will reach $50 billion in the near future but the Forum claims that such estimates are wildly optimistic.
While technology analysts such as Ovum are predicting significant growth in the forthcoming years (see MMS Will Not Take Off Till 2004, Says Ovum), the W2F is more cautious, warning that multimedia messaging will not take off until the majority of prepay handsets become MMS enabled. Based on a study of the sixteen major world markets, the report suggests that only 1% of total message volume will be attributable to MMS by 2004.
The MMS share is expected to increase to 10% in 2006 by which stage the Forum estimates that revenues will total $5.8 billion. This is still around 80% lower than many current analysts’ predictions.
The W2F calculates that photo and simple peer-to-peer messaging will account for almost 700 million messages each per month by 2006. Not surprisingly, the US, Germany and the UK will be the largest markets and 15-19 year olds will be the most frequent users of MMS.
