Dean Bubley:Is MMS Successful?

Dean Bubley comments at Disruptive Wireless about a recent "piece of analysis/spin/marketing" that found "MMS can be seen as a very popular and successful service." He writes:

Just a shame that operators have subsidised something like a billion cameraphones to the tune of around $10-20 a piece (apparently about $9 for the camera module and then a bunch of bits of software & integration work), plus had to invest $XXbn in MMSCs and other bits of infrastructure, and $YYbn in developing & marketing their photo messaging services.

It's pretty difficult to get any reliable stats on MMS traffic, but the anecdotal evidence I've seen points to a maximum of around 150-200m being sent globally per month (excluding the exceptional-as-usual Japanese). Verizon's one of the leaders, at 62m per quarter (ie 21m per month), while another big advocate Telecom Italia Mobile made a grand total of €49m from MMS in 2005. Scaling that up means MMS is (optimistically) a $2bn business in 2006.

Yeah, great success, given a cumulative investment of the order of $20bn+