Picture messages slow to take off

Will Euro 2004 kick-start MMS?

Most UK phone users have yet to use their mobile to send pictures, music or video clips, a study has shown.

The NOP poll found that 80% of people had not send any multimedia messages.

The main reason was that 45% of those who took part in the survey did not have the right type of mobile.

But even among those with the latest phones, many were confused about costs of picture messaging, while 17% admitted they did not know how to send multimedia messages.

Family snaps

Of the 21% of mobile users who have dipped their toes in the world of multimedia messaging, the majority used their phones to send pictures of friends and family.

Music clips were the second most popular use of MMS and sports clips came in third.

MMS USE 83% have never sent an MMS 45% do not have compatible mobiles 17% did not know how to send a message 78% of MMS users have sent pictures of friends or family 27% had sent music clips 14% had sent sports clips

Sicap, a Switzerland-based firm which sells software to support the mass delivery of MMS, believes that the upcoming summer of sport may kick-start the craze.

Euro 2004 and the Athens Olympic Games could prove the turning points for the technology in Europe, it believes.

There is some evidence to support this theory. MMS adoption in Asia rose on the back of the 2002 football World Cup.

T-Mobile will be providing football fans with video clips of goals and the best of the action at Euro 2004.

MMS will have a job to emulate the success of simple text messaging. According to the Mobile Data Association, 2.1 billion text messages are sent monthly, around 69 million a day.

"The findings of our survey highlight that we will still have a lot more to do to encourage consumers to embrace MMS in the same way as they have SMS," said Per-Johan Lundin, head of marketing at Sicap.

Persuading people to get MMS-enabled handsets is the first priority, as is ensuring that services are extremely user-friendly, he said.