The Times: Tech column - Multimedia messaging/FaxYourMP.com/Net radio
By David Rowan
THE mobile-phone industry has discovered a new "killer application". Not content with overselling WAP (wireless application protocol) then almost rejecting text-messaging as a needless handset add-on, the debt-burdened phone companies are desperately hyping "multimedia messaging" as the latest solution to all our communications needs.
Should we believe them? This is an industry, don't forget, facing ever-deeper economic problems: handset sales fell last year for the first time since 1990, and let us not start on debt. With third-generation networks still some way off in Europe, the marketing departments are going all out to promote the multimedia messaging service (MMS) as the reason to spend £200 on a replacement phone. MMS is to text-messaging (or SMS) what the holiday video is to the postcard - a neat way of sending pictures, sound clips and colour between phones. Networks dream of the day when MMS consumers will send anything approaching the 44 million text messages that are currently exchanged every day.
Some hope. Early signs are that networks will charge anywhere between 26p and 83p to send each colour photograph that your camera-equipped phone lets you take, or each song clip that you play using its "polyphonic" sound chip. Compare that with the 10p that a typical text message costs, and suddenly your bills move beyond pocket money. Besides, manufacturers were able to equip phones for SMS so cheaply that it became universal. MMS, by contrast, will catch on only if enough of us buy the expensive colour phones: Nokia is promising ten new models this year, and Sony Ericsson has just launched its T300 image-ready phone. Yet the usual handset shortage will slow down the take-up.
It is hard to believe predictions from the likes of the Ovum consultancy that, within five years, annual MMS revenues will reach £50 billion. Buoyed by the short-term blossoming of the novelty ring-tone market, the industry is convinced that most of its profits will come from premium-rate services, from cartoons to horoscopes. That is an ominous presumption, considering the weakness of demand for third-party content other than porn.
I readily admit that multimedia applications, from picture-messaging to song-swapping, are an attractive proposition for those in the market for a phone upgrade, and the handsets themselves are wonderfully stylish. But the business models emerging from the likes of Vodafone and mmO2 suggest that MMS is being aimed largely at their shareholders, in a desperate bid to persuade them that profits will some day return.
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THE steam rising from hundreds of hostile websites helped to defeat the Home Secretary's amendments to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) last week. But the main credit should go to a small, non-profit site run by a dozen volunteers. FaxYourMP.com grew out of the original campaign against RIPA, since when this simple web interface has delivered almost 31,000 missives on every range of issues to MPs. Last week, the site sent 1,789 faxes, of which around 1,600 related to David Blunkett's amendments, an average of more than two per MP. You could e-mail your MP - Parliament's own website offers a guide (www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/alms.htm) - but we know how easy e-mails are to ignore. Besides, only two thirds of MPs even publish an e-mail address - and T Blair is not among them.
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AS MORE people have installed high-speed web connections, internet radio has become a huge growth area; one network alone, Live365, promotes 30,000 stations, ranging from Christian gospel to gay talk shows. But for most it seems that time is up: the US Copyright Office decided last week that they should pay royalty fees of 70 cents (50p) a song per 1,000 listeners. The fees, following lobbying by the record industry, are backdated to 1998, and their impact will be crippling: one with 2,000 simultaneous listeners must pay about $350 a day. Listen while you can.
(The Times, June 26 2002)
THE mobile-phone industry has discovered a new "killer application". Not content with overselling WAP (wireless application protocol) then almost rejecting text-messaging as a needless handset add-on, the debt-burdened phone companies are desperately hyping "multimedia messaging" as the latest solution to all our communications needs.
Should we believe them? This is an industry, don't forget, facing ever-deeper economic problems: handset sales fell last year for the first time since 1990, and let us not start on debt. With third-generation networks still some way off in Europe, the marketing departments are going all out to promote the multimedia messaging service (MMS) as the reason to spend £200 on a replacement phone. MMS is to text-messaging (or SMS) what the holiday video is to the postcard - a neat way of sending pictures, sound clips and colour between phones. Networks dream of the day when MMS consumers will send anything approaching the 44 million text messages that are currently exchanged every day.
Some hope. Early signs are that networks will charge anywhere between 26p and 83p to send each colour photograph that your camera-equipped phone lets you take, or each song clip that you play using its "polyphonic" sound chip. Compare that with the 10p that a typical text message costs, and suddenly your bills move beyond pocket money. Besides, manufacturers were able to equip phones for SMS so cheaply that it became universal. MMS, by contrast, will catch on only if enough of us buy the expensive colour phones: Nokia is promising ten new models this year, and Sony Ericsson has just launched its T300 image-ready phone. Yet the usual handset shortage will slow down the take-up.
It is hard to believe predictions from the likes of the Ovum consultancy that, within five years, annual MMS revenues will reach £50 billion. Buoyed by the short-term blossoming of the novelty ring-tone market, the industry is convinced that most of its profits will come from premium-rate services, from cartoons to horoscopes. That is an ominous presumption, considering the weakness of demand for third-party content other than porn.
I readily admit that multimedia applications, from picture-messaging to song-swapping, are an attractive proposition for those in the market for a phone upgrade, and the handsets themselves are wonderfully stylish. But the business models emerging from the likes of Vodafone and mmO2 suggest that MMS is being aimed largely at their shareholders, in a desperate bid to persuade them that profits will some day return.
++++
THE steam rising from hundreds of hostile websites helped to defeat the Home Secretary's amendments to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) last week. But the main credit should go to a small, non-profit site run by a dozen volunteers. FaxYourMP.com grew out of the original campaign against RIPA, since when this simple web interface has delivered almost 31,000 missives on every range of issues to MPs. Last week, the site sent 1,789 faxes, of which around 1,600 related to David Blunkett's amendments, an average of more than two per MP. You could e-mail your MP - Parliament's own website offers a guide (www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/alms.htm) - but we know how easy e-mails are to ignore. Besides, only two thirds of MPs even publish an e-mail address - and T Blair is not among them.
++++
AS MORE people have installed high-speed web connections, internet radio has become a huge growth area; one network alone, Live365, promotes 30,000 stations, ranging from Christian gospel to gay talk shows. But for most it seems that time is up: the US Copyright Office decided last week that they should pay royalty fees of 70 cents (50p) a song per 1,000 listeners. The fees, following lobbying by the record industry, are backdated to 1998, and their impact will be crippling: one with 2,000 simultaneous listeners must pay about $350 a day. Listen while you can.
(The Times, June 26 2002)
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