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Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS (Short Message Service) capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length.

The most popular use is to send photographs from camera-equipped handsets. It is also used on a commercial basis by media companies as a method of delivering news and entertainment content and by retail brands as a tool for delivering scanable coupon codes, product images, videos and other information. Unlike text only SMS, commercial MMS can deliver a variety of media including up to forty seconds of video, one image, multiple images via slideshow or audio plus unlimited characters.

The standard is developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), although during development it was part of the 3GPP and WAP groups.

History

Multimedia messaging services were first developed as a captive technology that would enable service providers to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo."^[1]

Early MMS deployments were plagued by technical issues and frequent consumer disappointments, but in recent years MMS deployment by major technology companies have solved many of the early challenges through handset detection, content optimization, increased throughput, etc.

China was one of the early markets to make MMS a major commercial success partly as the penetration rate of personal computers was modest but MMS-capable cameraphones spread rapidly. The chairman and CEO of China Mobile said at the GSM Association Mobile Asia Congress in 2009 that MMS in China is now a mature service on par with SMS text messaging.

Europe's most advanced MMS market has been Norway and in 2008 the Norwegian MMS usage level had passed 84% of all mobile phone subscribers. Norwegian mobile subscribers average one MMS sent per week.

Between 2010 and 2013, MMS traffic in the U.S. increased by 70% from 57 Billion to 96 Billion messages sent. ^[2] One of the main reason behind increase in MMS traffic is decrease of usage of proprietary Mobile Operating Systems, as they had different implementations for enconding and MMS message handling. As most of the smartphones are running Android, MMS encoding and implementation gets generalized hence usage of MMS has been increased substantially.

Read more here>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service