Special delivery: An increase in MMS adoption

This article is aimed at identifying thconsumer'se additional factors that are not considered by the research communities in addressing the problems affecting the growth of MMS in a mobile network. The technocommercial issues are highlighted and a solution is proposed that is technically feasible and commercially acceptable. The main contribution is in highlighting the drawbacks of the current delivery mechanism where users are unable to evaluate the content before downloading an MMS message. In the cunent mechanism, the different parts of an MMS message (including audio, video, and image) are transcoded in the MMS center to make the contents presentable to heterogeneous types of mobile handsets. We show that with the delivery of a summary of the contents, the consumer's acceptability to MMS can be potentially improved. The proposed change in the delivery process, which considers the dynamic situation of the handset, will enhance the MMS presentation and improve the level of satisfaction. The change will enable the operator to divide the charge between the sender and receiver and also to exploit the asymmetry in utility gained.