The ball is now rolling for exciting new multimedia messaging services (MMS) with an agreement between Nokia and international sports marketing company IMG.

Nokia and IMG have teamed up to develop an MMS Essential Sports Service, delivering sports images, news, updates and audio commentary to sports' fans' mobile phones. The service aims to prove the market is ready and willing when it comes to mobile multimedia services, generating new and lucrative revenue opportunities for operators

The Essential Sports service will be tailored to suit the specific interests in different regions - Europe, the USA and Asia Pacific. The service will be available to Nokia's operator customers, who will then be able to brand their services individually.

Nokia has among the wireless industry's most extensive track record in MMS with around 40 customers to date and an ever-growing number of launched systems, making multimedia messaging a reality for today's mobile consumers and a strategic growth area for Nokia and the industry.

"MMS is already taking the industry by storm with strong growth in markets like Italy where in the first two weeks of service over 180,000 Multimedia Messages were sent. We want to see this happen in all markets and with all our customers and this agreement with IMG is just one example of the initiatives we are taking," explains Esa Harju, Director, Strategic Marketing, Nokia Networks.

"As the world's leading sports promoter, IMG is a good cooperation partner for us to work with in developing MMS services that are easily replicable and commercially sustainable. Nokia believes MMS will form the next wave of mobile data, moving us beyond text to images and sound . MMS will spur a rapid growth increase in data usage traffic and lead us into 3G and an even richer service experience," continues Harju.

"IMG has delivered mobile content services since 1996 and is constantly reviewing the potential of emerging technologies. With MMS, we see a major opportunity to create compelling rich media services that deliver the emotion of sport. This global project with Nokia provides an ideal opportunity to explore the potential of rich media services with mobile operators," says Mark Selby, Head of IMG's Mobile Division.

"Sports are universally popular and IMG's analysis of mobile user behaviour patterns certainly indicates that MMS offers a major opportunity for new rich media. This Essential Sports project will enable mobile operators, Nokia and IMG to gather critical experience in the delivery and satisfaction of sports fans on their multimedia mobile devices," adds Selby.

Multimedia messages can be sent between MMS-capable phones or even to legacy phones, thanks to the Nokia Multimedia Terminal Gateway. The Nokia solution provides content storage, voice messaging over MMS, intelligent connectivity to e-mail, and rich push/pull applications among other services.

The Nokia MMS solution allows consumers to send and receive rich messages containing text, images, graphics, voice, and audio clips. Nokia's imaging handsets, 7650 and 3650, further extend the company's support for MMS.