re: MMS in China
The Beijing based author (The Mouth) is a former VP of Business China at Ericsson (China):
The Mouth thinks that in China stating one thing and implementing the same thing successfully, are not really one and the same thing. There are a number of cases for that (which in themselves would be interesting to further explore), but let me state that I seriously believe that China Mobile will have the service up and running 1st October, as they did with both WAP and GPRS before.
>> MMS - The Next Big Thing (Hype)
(Will China see MMS anytime soon - njae but it will happen)
David Almstrom
MFC Insight Update
16 Aug, 2002
You may have seen it, you sure have read about it, and you think once again - there is a technology that is going to change the world! Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is here to bring you happiness and world peace.
MMS is supposed to be the savior for the users, rescuing the SMS addicted crowd from the poor performance of 'texting' - text-based short messaging (a mobile form of Instant Messaging) - to empower them with rich multimedia messaging comprised of video, photos, animations, colors, audio and text. MMS is also supposed to save the operators, taking their non-existing mobile data revenues to a significant amount of dollars that will be reflected both in top-line revenues and bottom-line profit.
The Mouth, who knows how to hype things, is afraid that once again this all may be hype. Will MMS fall flat of delivering its promises, or is this hype different this time? Let's look at today's global and Chinese markets to see if MMS is going to deliver on what it promises...
There Might Be A Market For Multimedia Messaging?
We start out tour in the East, and as usual, there is action in Japan! J-phone's successful sha-mail service has allowed Japan's mobile market to surge ahead - once again - in New Mobile Services. Sha-mail is a photo-messaging service that comes bundled with the camera already built into the phone. J-phone positioned this as a service - something that is designed to improve communication for the user - and completely avoided all talk about the technology. And when sha-mail was introduced, it boosted J-phone up to the number one position for new subscriber acquisitions over the next few months as they were the only ones to offer photo-messaging services.
In Japan, there are obvious benefits to the user of taking snapshots and sending them to friends as email or phone messages. As is often the case with Japan's mobile services, ease of use and a focus on how the user is using the services have been key factors supporting the quick uptake and success for sha-mail.
All major operators are very keen in introducing MMS, praying that it will provide the business case for mobile data-based value added services to justify their investments in GPRS and 3G. And the MMS deployment has already started. At least three operators in HK (of which CSL was the first), are offering MMS. In Europe, a number of operators are offering MMS - the first of which was in Hungary!
Why would MMS be different from WAP, GPRS and 3G? Well, at the moment it isn't. As long as the operators and vendors are focusing on technology and not users needs and behavior, there is a great danger that earlier experiences with the latter three technologies will be repeated when the MMS hype dwindles down to disappointment and non-usage.
However, MMS still has the potential to be a different story. Building off of the success of SMS, a user-created market that has spread like a virus around the world and shows no sign of stopping, the operators may be able to tease the SMS users into trying out MMS. But then again, it has to be just as easy to use, reasonably priced and provide an obvious value-add like SMS.
MMS in China - Hype or Reality?
Well, MMS will arrive in China - no doubt. China Mobile has confirmed that they will launch MMS in China on the 1st of October, 2002! So, it has to happen¡ right?
The Mouth thinks that in China stating one thing and implementing the same thing successfully, are not really one and the same thing. There are a number of cases for that (which in themselves would be interesting to further explore), but let me state that I seriously believe that China Mobile will have the service up and running 1st October, as they did with both WAP and GPRS before.
However, availability of service does not in itself ensure user uptake. MMS is fairly complicated from a technical point of view and also from a user perspective.
There a number of issues to solve before MMS happens big time and affects China Mobile's or China Unicom's bottom line.
* First, it is the normal technical problems to solve. As with GPRS, there are still some technical problems - such as WAP gateway blocking or the inability to read some sites (esp. overseas sites) or CMnet's IP-address look-up services that make it quicker to manually look up IP addressed instead of typing in URLs.
In MMS, you have an array of handsets with different capabilities of color, video, quality of pictures, storage of data, etc. The MMS server in the operator's network is supposed to be able to adopt the content to each terminal/handset based on their capabilities. Now, that itself might be an issue in the Chinese market where you have at least 6-7 foreign vendors with existing market share, maybe 5-10 new foreign vendors who wants to enter the GPRS/PDA market and not to forget the 15-20 local vendors who also all want a piece of this market.
* Second, MMS is based on GPRS as a transport mechanism. Some of the MMS messages can be pretty significant in terms of size, maybe up to a couple of hundred kilobytes (and even bigger since there is no limitation on MMS). The GPRS network in China doesn't yet fulfill its promises of reliable quality and high performance (as it doesn't in many other countries, including western Europe). GPRS is basically using the extra bandwidth in the GSM network and in most cases, there is no available extra bandwidth. Now, this may be the reason to go UMTS but then again, we're still talking a few years down the road.
* Third, with MMS there is a lot of content rich business to be developed, so the operators need to create a business environment that will allow all parties to benefit from users. Currently, Monternet provides this environment. However, it will be seriously more complicated as the messages get bigger and more content rich.
* Fourth, addressing the market properly with the right pricing to the right users is probably the most serious issue to getting the market going. The users who are the first to buy the MMS enabled phones may not necessarily be the ones who appreciate and send MMS as emails or MMS to other users. A proper market strategy involves identifying and targeting the right segments and delivering value to them based on MMS that matches the prices for simple MMS, full fledged MMS, content rich MMS, etc.
Personally, the Mouth doesn't believe that it is the rich, successful businessmen who will drive the MMS market in China - but they are the ones that will buy SonyEricsson's T68i and Nokia's 7650. It is more likely the tech-savvy youth crowd will be the first to initially find amusement and joy in sending and receiving MMS, as they were also the first to use SMS.
But, in conclusion, MMS will happen in China - more likely later than sooner, and bigger than expected. MMS will rock.
David Almstrom, aka The Wireless Guru, was previously Vice President of Business China at Ericsson (China). He now balances work between his independent consulting unit - Zola - and his time at MFC Insight as consultant extraordinaire. He is a regular (and entertaining) speaker at conferences and in the media on the developing wireless landscape across Asia. <<
- Eric - |
