My Crawl Through Broken Glass

Though my titular reference within the MobileMuse.ca project is Research Director, in practice, my role is more of chief technology officer.  But lately my role has been one of major domo lab rat.

People might be expecting insightful guidance on future trends in mobile multi-media from me, but in truth, I've spent the past 7 days in a dark windowless room trying to bastardize together a content delivery system based on MMS.

I feel as if I have egg on my face (figuratively speaking of course), since I've been heavily promoting the use of MMS as a mechanism for rich-media interaction between content providers and end users.  To date MMS has been marketed by wireless carriers as a P2P system for exchanging still images.  As one of the 27 people in Canada who have actually used this service, I can tell you it by and large sucks.

Getting it up and running is usually at best a mess and at worse (which was my experience) and nightmarish trip down a deep dark hole.  As for end user experience?  Well maybe you've seen that commercial where the guy is in the store clicking photos of items then sending them off to his wife at home for a thumbs up or down rating.  You'd think this happens in near-realtime.  The truth is it can take less than a minute or over 2 hours to receive these P2P messages.  And sometimes you don't get them at all.

In spite of that, I really like MMS for rich-media.  Some of my reasons are as follows:

1. Carriers have a viable business model for MMS.  This is typically a fixed fee for sending an MMS and usually free to receive an MMS.  In addition, data usage charges are waived for the content of an MMS.  So an MMS that is 500KB in length carries no transport fees and a fixed rate of around $.25.  Compare this to simply delivering the content to end users via HTML.  At $.03 KB, the same content is decidely pricey.
2. Handsets are ergonomically designed to make sending and receiving MMS very simple.  This means few keystrokes to either send or receive and these interfaces are typically highly contextual; meaning after I snap a picture with my camera, most phones allow you to send it as an MMS in probably less than 3 keystrokes.  The end result is that end users have a very low barrier to adoption.  Contrast this to web browsing on the phone.  Most people have no idea they can web browse, and once they begin to do it, they wish they'd never learned how.  The interfaces are cumbersome and general performance brutal.  And at the end of the month they typicaly receive an unpleasant surprise on the cellular bill.
3. The MMS infrastructure solves a lot of device and network adaptation issues for multi-media for content providers.  Rather than have content providers worry about screen sizes, colour depth, resolutions, codecs, the MMS infrastructure dynamically adapts content to be tailored to the receiving device.  The benefit to the content developer is huge.

Alas, if only it were so!  As it turns out deploying content based on the MMS standard in carrier networks in Canada is a very frustrating exercise.  Carriers refuse to open up connectivity to this rich media channel.  This leaves pioneers like the Mobile MUSE project crawling through broken glass as we try to implement prototypical experiences for early market adopters to use this technology.

And that's how I've ended up in a darkened windowless lab for the past 7 days.  I spent my hours cobbling together simulations of emulations of approximations of what really is a fine fine service.  All because carriers refuse to participate in innovation.

I remain undaunted however.  I'm convinced that MMS has tremendous upside for value added service providers as a new medium for bi-directional communications with mobile users.  I just hope I'll live long enough to see it happen