How long a video can you text? MMS and iMessage limits for business

A 30-second clip shot on a modern phone is often 50 MB or more. Carriers deliver MMS reliably only up to about 1 MB, and the exact ceiling depends on the carrier and the recipient's device. The clip is roughly 50 times too big, and nothing in your texting tool fixes that.

This post covers what fits inside MMS limits, the bitrate math for estimating video length before you export, how iMessage changes things, and why a link in a plain SMS is the right choice for most marketing video.

What the carriers actually allow

No single official MMS size limit exists for business texting. Carriers set their own ceilings, change them without much notice, and handle oversized files differently. Some reject the file. Some compress it into something blurry. Some deliver a placeholder the recipient can't open. The working ranges most senders use are:

• Under about 600 KB: delivers almost everywhere, including older Android phones and smaller carriers.
• About 600 KB to 1 MB: usually delivers on the major US carriers, but expect some compression on arrival.
• Above about 1 MB: delivery gets unreliable. Some carriers accept it and transcode it, some drop it, and some recipients see a "download failed" bubble.

Treat these as round approximations, not a spec. "My provider accepted the upload" doesn't mean the file reached the phone. The provider may take a 5 MB file and pass it to the carrier, and the carrier then decides what happens to it.

If your MMS sends are already failing or arriving as broken attachments, work through our MMS troubleshooting checklist before you blame the video itself.

The bitrate math: how many seconds fit in 1 MB

Video length inside a size cap depends on bitrate: how many bits per second the encoded file uses for picture and sound. The formula is simple:

Seconds that fit = file size limit (in kilobits) ÷ total bitrate (in kilobits per second)

1 MB is about 8,000 kilobits. Here's what that buys at a few bitrates. These are illustrative encodings, not carrier rules:

The honest answer to "how long a video can you text" is roughly 10 to 30 seconds, and only if you accept low resolution. If the video has text on screen, product detail, or anything your brand team cares about, 240p will look rough on a modern phone.

Worked example: a 15-second promo clip

Say you have a 15-second product clip and want it to land under 900 KB, leaving some headroom below the ~1 MB ceiling.

• 900 KB ≈ 7,200 kilobits
• 7,200 ÷ 15 seconds = 480 kbps total budget
• Give audio about 64 kbps (mono AAC is fine for voice), which leaves about 416 kbps for video
• At 416 kbps, 360p is realistic and 480p will look soft

So a 15-second clip at 360p fits. A 45-second clip at that quality won't, unless you drop to a resolution that looks broken.

Compressing video for MMS without wrecking it

If you're set on sending the file itself, these steps help, roughly in order of impact:

1. Cut the length first. Halving the duration halves the file at the same quality, and no codec setting comes close to that.
2. Drop the resolution. 360p or 480p, not 1080p. Most recipients watch inline in a small bubble anyway.
3. Use H.264 video in an MP4 container. It's the most widely accepted format across carriers and handsets. Newer codecs compress better but don't play everywhere.
4. Lower the frame rate to 24 or 30 fps. Phones often record at 60, which wastes bits on talking-head content.
5. Use mono, low-bitrate audio. Around 64 kbps is plenty for speech.
6. Use two-pass encoding with a target file size, not a quality slider. You want a predictable output size, and two-pass gets you there.
7. Check the exported file size before sending, not the size your editor estimated.

Even done well, the carrier may re-compress your file on the way through. You don't control the final quality, which is the main argument for the next section.

When a link beats an attachment

For most marketing video, we'd send a plain SMS with a link to the video hosted on your own site or a video host. Here's why:

• No size ceiling. A 2-minute 1080p video plays exactly as you exported it.
• Consistent quality. The carrier transcodes nothing.
• You can measure it. Plays, watch time and click-through come from your video host or analytics, not from guessing at MMS delivery receipts.
• It's cheaper to send. A short text with a link is usually one SMS segment, while MMS is billed differently and usually costs more per message. Our post on avoiding MMS charges covers that tradeoff in detail.

Worked example: a 5,000-contact video campaign as SMS

Assumptions: an opted-in list of 5,000 contacts, and this message:

"Ready to see the new spring line? 40-second walkthrough here: example.com/spring. Reply STOP to opt out."

That's under 160 GSM-7 characters with no emoji, so it's 1 segment. On Ready Standard, each segment is $0.0075 plus a $0.0045 carrier fee:

• Rate: 5,000 × 1 × $0.0075 = $38
• Carrier fee: 5,000 × $0.0045, itemized separately on the bill
• This excludes the optional compliance surcharge. TCPA/DNC scrubbing and landline validation are each $0.003 per segment if you switch them on, and both are off by default.

Add one emoji and the same message drops to the 70-character unicode limit, so it splits into 2 segments and the rate line doubles. On Ready, curly quotes and long dashes get swapped for plain ones before sending, but an emoji still changes the count. Leave it out of link texts.

Link caveats worth knowing

• Public link shorteners get filtered. Shared shortener domains appear in a lot of spam, and carriers treat them that way. Use your own domain or a branded short domain. We cover more content-level filtering in why approved campaigns still get filtered.
• Don't count on the preview card. iPhones and many Android phones show a rich preview for some links and not others, and carrier handling affects it. Our post on link previews not showing on iPhone explains what survives. Write the text so it works with a bare URL.
• Make the landing page load fast on mobile. A video page that takes six seconds to start loses people the attachment would have kept.

How iMessage changes the picture

iMessage doesn't go through carrier MMS. It moves over Apple's network as data, so attachment limits are far more generous than MMS, and video arrives at much better quality. That's why a video sent between two iPhones looks sharp while the same video sent to an Android friend looks smeared.

For business, that only matters if you're sending as iMessage. Ready's iMessage line does that: texts show up blue on iPhones with your business name and photo. Before you plan a video campaign around it, know these constraints:

• Price: $99 a month per line, plus 6 cents a segment for each text sent. A reply to an iMessage line is also 6 cents a segment.
• Media waits for a reply. An iMessage line can send up to 2 texts to someone until they reply, and photos only go after they reply. For other attachment types, check the iMessage line guide before planning around them.
• New conversations are capped. Each line can start up to 50 new conversations a day. Texting people you already talk with is unlimited.
• Campaigns don't go through it. Campaigns and drip campaigns send from regular numbers, not the iMessage line.
• Android contacts get regular texts. Texts to Android phones go from the account's regular number, so they're subject to MMS limits again. If the account already had a number they bill at the regular text price; if the iMessage line came with its green number, they bill at 6 cents a segment once the account registers.

The iMessage line fits one-to-one conversations, such as a sales rep sending a walkthrough video after a prospect replies. It doesn't fit a 5,000-person video promo.

Quick comparison: three ways to get video to a phone

Sending media through the API

If you're building this into your own product, Ready's messaging API sends a picture as MMS by adding a media_url field to POST /v1/messages. Check the messages API docs for supported media types and size handling before you build a video flow on it, rather than assuming any format will pass. For most platforms, the more reliable pattern is still a plain SMS body containing a link to the hosted video, plus consent_attested: true for a recipient who has agreed to receive texts.

Video campaigns are still marketing texts. They go to opted-in contacts only, on a registered 10DLC campaign. Ready holds sends during the recipient's quiet hours and blocks opted-out numbers automatically. Compliance remains your responsibility as the sender. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.

The practical takeaway

• Under about 20 seconds, low-res is acceptable, and the list is small: compress to 360p H.264, keep it under about 900 KB, and send it as MMS.
• Anything longer, sharper or sent at scale: host it and send a 1-segment SMS with a branded link and no emoji.
• One-to-one with iPhone contacts who already reply to you: the iMessage line gives you iMessage quality in the conversation thread.

If you want to test the link approach before committing, you can sign up. The first 20 one-to-one texts are free, so send the link version to a few colleagues on different phones and carriers and see how it arrives before you register and launch the campaign.