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Instant Messaging (IM) - Evolving Into A Multimedia Hub
IDATE, Jan 2006, Pages: 110
This market report delivers in-depth analysis of the instant messaging (IM) market, and its ongoing development (interoperability, VoIP, mobility…) in both the consumer and business segments. IM has become a major market in terms of advertising for portals, traffic for mobile operators and licences for business application publishers.
- Instant messaging began to develop in the late 1990s as a system for sending person-to-person text messages in real time.
- But IM now goes well beyond its initial role, and has become a strategic multimedia hub for promoting other services. And so it finds itself at the heart of a battle between ISPs and web portals (and particularly between the portals themselves: MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, QQ, etc…) and, more recently, attracting a great many new entrants.
- Popularised by consumers chatting in real time over their computers, IM is now becoming increasingly common on mobile devices, boasting a still largely untapped potential.
- In Europe and in China, fixed and mobile operators have often preferred to design their own proprietary tools, with only very relative success. In South Korea and the United States, on the other hand, operators work in tandem with the leading portals, leveraging their brand names and their user communities, and appear to be obtaining better results.
- Instant messaging has also made its way into the business world. It is a market that obeys a very different logic, more akin to the world of computing as operated by its leaders, Microsoft and IBM. Presence enables new applications, integrated into existing ones, and built around collaboration and contextualisation.
IM already a killer app on PC
Since its inception in 1996, with the launch of ICQ, instant messaging has become one of the most popular applications on the fixed web. It has in fact become a mass market, with over 10 billion messages being exchanged every day, and involving close to one in two web users in developed countries, in North America, Europe and Asia. IM is gradually nearing a relative saturation point in these countries, while still enjoying a steady rise in other countries, such as China.
- All internet users are involved in the phenomenon, regardless of sex, education or socio economic status. Only the type of connection (broadband makes its use easier because of a lack of time constraints) and users' age create any real distinction.
- The youngest Netizens, and teenagers in particular, are the most avid IM users, and often use it more than e-mail or their mobile phones to communicate with each other, in addition to taking advantage en masse of some of the newest features available.
- In Europe, the average time spent using an IM tool already exceeded three hours a month, and five hours a month for users in the US, in 2004. Many youngsters chat over IM every day.
IM has evolved into a role of remote control or multimedia hub
Drawing on its innovative features, such as presence management (buddies online), IM has been enhanced with a host of services that are very popular with users, built around communication (file exchange, PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone voice calls, webconferencing) and personalization (emoticons, avatars, skins).
- IM distinguishes itself from other communication tools thanks to its multitasking nature, allowing users to engage in simultaneous activities, both on their computer (web browsing, gaming…) and off (talking on the phone, watching TV…).
- Portals are taking advantage of this convergent tool to promote their other services (webmail, blogs, content…), thanks to tabbing systems. The latest addition to the line-up is a built-in search engine.
- IM is also gradually being incorporated into websites, and community sites in particular (dating, online gaming, social networking) and could find its way into the TV of the future.
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