Empirical observations on the emergence of mobile multimedia services and applications in the U.S. and Europe

• Authors: Hannu Verkasalo
• Venue: MUM '06 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia
• Year: 2006

Mobile multimedia is still at early stages of commercialization, and pioneering solutions are currently adopted by only early-adopter-type of end-users. Accurate handset-based usage-level measurements have been implemented in several panel studies taking place both in the U.S. and Europe (France, England, Germany and Finland) in 2005-2006. These studies have included more than 1 700 Symbian smartphone users, who represent early-adopter subscribers. The results of these studies provide a lot of insights on the current coverage of mobile multimedia services among early-adopters. It seems that the camera application and various games are by far the most widely used multimedia-oriented mobile applications. The role of games reflects particularly in the 3rd party application scene. Various multimedia players were also identified. Many of them deal with offline content (e.g. offline music/movies), but there were quite a number of streaming applications evident in the data, too. 13% of all panelists had actually generated packet data with multimedia applications. People who utilize streaming packet data services usually generate the biggest chunk of their data use with these applications. In multimedia communications it was found that video call usage was very infrequent in Europe (video calls need 3G infrastructure). However, both Bluetooth and MMS messaging have attracted decent masses. Americans utilize mobile emailing and instant messaging very actively. The on-going emergence of instant messaging and other ways of multimedia communications is an observation worth follow-up studies. This empirical study contributes to the current understanding of real usage patterns of mobile multimedia services and applications, at the same time presenting a useful research platform in implementing this kind of studies on end-customer behavior also in the future.