NTT DoCoMo has announced a new video messaging service that eschews MMS to use the video call function of its 3G phones. It’s essentially video voicemail — users initiate a video call (as best I can tell, anyway) to a particular number, then record a message of up to three minutes, which gets left in the recipient’s video voicemail. I’d assume that it then gets checked like any normal voicemail, only with a video call. Like using video shortcodes to deliver content, this makes a lot more sense than using MMS for short video messages in many instances. There’s zero set-up, there’s no wait for uploads or downloads.
Video calling has, um, failed to set the world alight. Operators were so convinced that person-to-person video calls would drive demand for 3G, but interest in the feature has failed to materialize, and real-world uses are few and far between. There’s essentially no demand for live, two-way video calls; however, there are times where people want to send videos — and using the video calling mechanism for content delivery could be a better solution. Forget video calling as a replacement for standard voice calls; perhaps its future is in content delivery.
[tags]mobile, 3g, video calling[/tags]
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