MMS up 37% in the UK since May

I caught this news in the Glasgow Evening Times newspaper this morning. The paper reports that Orange UK customers uploaded a million photos from their handsets to online photo albums in August alone.

Hmm.

Have a read of the story:

MOBILE phones are increasingly being used for services other than calls and texts it seems.

A study of 15.4million Orange customers showed a 37% increase in picture messaging since May this year.

Customers uploaded more than a million photos from their handsets on to online photo albums in August alone, Orange said.

Music downloads to mobile phones are up 15% since May while the volume of games downloaded is up by 3.4%.

Text messaging continues to grow in popularity, with Orange recording a 25% increase their number in the past seven months.

Matthew Kirk of Orange said the role of the mobile phone was changing and added: ‘Coupled with mobile operator tieups with social network brands such as Bebo, mobile phones are quickly providing customers with another way of connecting with others the way text messaging did 10 years ago.”

Now. A million photo uploads a month is nothing. That’s a very small figure. Not much to be proud of. Not when you’ve got almost SIXTEEN million customers, the vast majority of them all equipped, thanks to your subsidies, with top quality camera phones. It’s also nothing when the UK is knocking back 4 billion text messages a month.

We’re not talking entire MMS traffic though, just ‘photo uploading’.

Interestingly, I can’t tell you what the UK picture messaging traffic is like. The stats on text.it, the MDA’s site, only talk about text messaging (5.3bn in the UK in October, by the way). Why don’t they regularly release picture messaging stats? Simple. It’s because it’s the industry black sheep. The poor second cousin. The uncle that gets a bit annoying after two drinks. Picture messaging, you see, makes the UK mobile operators look like idiots. It’s Emperor’s new clothes time. Text worked. Picture messaging, when introduced, didn’t. Finally it was more or less fixed but by then, the damage was done and the pricing was just stupid.

Only now is the market in the UK changing. Only now that picture messaging is included in many Flext style bundles has it gained general acceptance and wider use.

So I’m encouraged. I’m happier. I’m pleased the industry has more or less got over that one. The fact that Orange are reporting a 37% increase in traffic sounds good. It correlates with my experience. I see a lot more people using the MMS medium. That can only be good.