Value Subtracted
I was having a look at a company that does MMS dispatch for companies as a means of information customers about products. Nice idea, but handicapped by our friends the operators.
They have a nice button on the front page to send yourself an example message. I did so, and lo, I get an SMS. Not an MMS from them, but an SMS from Vodafone. It contains a URL (http://www.vodafone.co.uk/getmyphoto) and a random password. Given that the browser on the N95 is pretty good at rendering complex web pages, I clicked through to it. No chance. The magically Vodafone PageTrasher(tm) technology did a remarkable job of compression: the resulting page was zero bytes long. Nothing. Nada.
Some time later, I try the URL on my computer. I get a length page of legalise and options that looks like I’m going to have to pay to look at my message. Not only that, but the URL has changed to http://getmyphoto.vodafone.co.uk and I have to click on that manually.
Ignoring the legalise and pricing info, I click through, enter my password and lo, I’ve a two-frame MMS message reformatted by Vodafone into a table with two images in it, so if there were any neat SMIL messages, hidden jokes, or whatever, it’s all gone. And what if it had video or audio in it?
How on earth the marketing technology company can address such insanity, I don’t know. What I do know that the MMS market isn’t going anywhere until the operators stop doing this kind of thing and just get on with delivering to the very capable terminals.
