Mobile specialist Dialogue Communications has announced a major deal with Vodafone Australia for its MMS solution. Dialogues technology is being deployed by Vodafone to bring the first interactive made-for-mobile show, Street TV, to the companys 3G customers in Australia.
Street TV is a 3G made-for-mobile, 30-minute weekly TV show available 24/7 on Vodafone live! The service involves compressing and sending out Mobile TV video clips of up to 30 seconds in length to customers that have opted in to receive mobile advertising messages. Dialogues technical solution allows Vodafone to deliver a media rich MMS, including a call to action to download that weeks free full track music download (FTMD), as well as a clickthrough to the Street TV WAP Portal.
The technique, which has been pioneered by the Australian arm of the business, based in Sydney, in conjunction with Vodafone Australia, recently won an MMA Award for Consumer Content Offering. 
This is an innovative use of MMS which has really paid off, says David Green, Head of Vodafone Mobile Advertising. We have seen Mobile TV usage surge following the broadcast of these messages. As well as showing catch-up or preview footage, these video clips can also include messages from advertisers and sponsors, making this an important revenue stream. Having seen the success of this service on Street TV, we are now getting calls from other suppliers of Mobile TV shows that are keen to increase their viewer numbers.
Dialogue says it has also received interest from a range of other parties, including  estate agents that want to send out multimedia broadcasts of property details, as well as political parties that are keen to send out short speeches.
One of the benefits of MMS is that there is no confusion about data charges says Dialogue CEO, Hugh Spears. Consumers can incur quite high charges for downloading images and music from the mobile Internet, but with MMS everything is delivered to the phone without any cost to the end user.