A report from Portio Research is forecasting SMS revenues to reach $67 billion. The increase is mostly attributed to an expected increase in mobile subscriber base from 2.61 to 4.81 billion, sending 3.7 trillion messages. The Asian markets are expected to grow the fastest, comprising 50% of the subscriber base by 2008.
SMS accounts for approximately 75-80% of carrier’s non-voice plan revenue, with voice plans comprising 80% of worldwide mobile revenue. Competition amongst carriers has been eroding voice margins and mobile content providers for ring tones and wallpapers are on their last legs, with users more easily accessing content over the internet. One of the largest content companies, Moderati, was recently purchased by Bellrock Media, and will be transitioning into mobile applications. Consequently, carriers should be turning their attention to data services.
SMS has been the fastest growing messaging service, but the pricer MMS, e-mail, and mobile IM are expected to grow healthily as well. The report suggests operators must carefully manage rates for these alternatives in order to avoid cannibalizing the SMS market.
WebitPR also cites the report.
Hi Nick,
How do i email you about news tips and product exclusives?
thx
-vijay
Here’s what next gen should be all about: SMS should be no more then a low-level communication/ transmission API, much like SMTP or HTTP. There should be a second level, XML based envelope such as SOAP or RSS and a top level client UI environment.
Instead of a subscriber sending the “STOP” keyword to in a SMS, a local, generic UI environment should exist, which will have actions that in turn are in charge of sending the keyword to the short code. Much like no one today uses notepad to read or write RSS feeds.
Your thoughts?
You can email me at Nick, at techcrunch. Suki, I’m not sure what you mean by top level client UI environment. SMS seems to be designed to do one thing really well, send 140 bytes of data. Isn’t WAP a perfectly good protocol to build on top of?
i use http://www.create-ringtone.com to create and send FREE custom ringtones, wallpaper, mp3 and video files to cell phones around the world