History
Multimedia messaging services were first developed as a captive technology that would enable service providers to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo."
Early MMS deployments were plagued by technical issues and frequent consumer disappointments, such as having sent an MMS message, receiving a confirmation it had been sent, being billed for the MMS message, to find that it had not been delivered to the intended recipient. Pictures would often arrive in the wrong formats, and other media elements might be removed such as a video clip arriving without its sound.
At the MMS World Congress in 2004 in Vienna, all European mobile operator representatives who had launched MMS, admitted their MMS services were not making money for their networks. Also on all networks at the time, the most common uses were various adult oriented services that had been deployed using MMS.
China was one of the early markets to make MMS a major commercial success partly as the penetration rate of personal computers was modest but MMS-capable cameraphones spread rapidly. The chairman and CEO of China Mobile said at the GSM Association Mobile Asia Congress in 2009 that MMS in China is now a mature service on par with SMS text messaging.
Europe's most advanced MMS market has been Norway and in 2008 the Norwegian MMS usage level had passed 84% of all mobile phone subscribers. Norwegian mobile subscribers average one MMS sent per week.
By 2008 worldwide MMS usage level had passed 1.3 billion active users who generated 50 billion MMS messages and produced annual revenues of 26 billion dollars.
Read more about this topic: Multimedia Messaging Service
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