RCS video: formats, size limits and cost

Video plays right inside the customer's messaging app, either in a rich card with a title, a description and buttons, or on its own. There is no link to tap and no app to install: the customer sees your verified name and logo, taps play and watches. It is also the most expensive thing you can send over RCS, which is why the format and the file size are worth getting right before a campaign goes out.

Video format requirements

The platform may re-compress a video before delivery, even under the size limit, so send a clean, already-compressed file rather than a camera original.

How video shows up in a message

• In a rich card. The card has a media area, a title of up to 200 characters, a description of up to 2,000 and up to four buttons with 25-character labels. The media area comes in three heights, short, medium and tall, and anything that does not match is zoomed and cropped, so keep faces and text in the center of the frame. Wide shapes (2:1, 16:9 or 7:3) suit cards with the media on top; 3:4 suits cards with the media on the side.
• In a carousel. A carousel holds 2 to 10 cards, each with its own media and buttons. The cards are narrower, so 4:3 usually works best, and each video should be small because one message can carry several.
• On iPhone. iPhones have supported RCS business messages since iOS 18.1, video included. Carousels show as a stack of cards rather than a row you swipe, rich card text is cut off after about three lines, and some models show only the first two buttons. Set cards to the tall media height for iPhone, and put the key message and the two most important buttons first.

What video costs to send

In the US every RCS message is billed as Rich (text) or Rich Media, and any message with a video, image, card or carousel is Rich Media: $0.0150 per message on SimplyRCS, sent or received, plus the carrier's Rich Media surcharge at cost.

AT&T and Verizon charge the same surcharge at any file size. T-Mobile's covers a message up to 5 MB and adds $0.001 per MB over 5 MB, up to the 100 MB limit, on video you send and on photos or video customers send back.

A 25 MB video costs more than twice as much to deliver to a T-Mobile customer as a 5 MB one, and a 100 MB video more than eight times as much. Every surcharge, the size fee included, is passed through at cost and itemized on the invoice, and SimplyRCS flags a message over 5 MB before it sends. How RCS billing works lists every element and its type.

What is free

• Typing indicators, and delivery and read receipts.
• Taps on buttons that open a call, a link, a map or a calendar invite, and whatever the customer then does on the web page.
• Opening a card or watching the video.
• Messages that are never delivered.
• Customer replies on Verizon, which carry no carrier surcharge.

A typed reply, a reply-button tap, STOP or START, a shared location, and any photo, video or file the customer sends back are charged.

Video tours: one charge for a whole conversation

Sending several videos to the same person, such as a product walkthrough, a guided setup or a property tour, can cost far less than sending them one at a time. A sender set up for conversation pricing pays once for an entire conversation instead of per message.

How a conversation starts. It takes 4 messages within 24 hours, with at least 2 from the customer and at least 1 from you, in any order, so your message can come first. A typed reply, a tap on a reply button, a photo or file the customer sends, or a shared location counts as a customer message. A tap that opens a call, a link, a map or a calendar invite does not.

What it covers. Once those 4 messages are exchanged, one charge covers every message in the 24 hours from the first one: every video, every card and every reply, including the messages sent before the conversation qualified. On SimplyRCS that is $0.05 plus the carrier's conversation fee, which from 1 November 2026 is $0.03 on AT&T, $0.06 on T-Mobile and $0.009 on Verizon.

Build the tour around reply buttons. End each video with a reply button such as "Next video", "Show me pricing" or "Talk to someone". Each tap is a customer message, so a tour qualifies after two taps, and the customer chooses what to watch next.

When it pays off. With two customer taps, one conversation charge is cheaper than per-message billing from:

An 8-video tour with 6 taps costs about $0.20 to $0.26 per customer billed message by message, and $0.06 to $0.11 as one conversation: 57% to 70% less, depending on the carrier.

Keep each video under 5 MB. It loads faster, and it keeps T-Mobile's size fee out of the picture.

Know the trade-off. Conversation pricing is set for the sender, not for each conversation. Every conversation that reaches 4 messages is billed this way, so a short exchange of 2 texts and 2 replies costs more than it would per message. Businesses that also send one-off alerts often run video tours from a separate sender. Conversation pricing is also new: the carriers' fees start on 1 November 2026, and Google still describes it as a pilot.

If the phone cannot receive RCS

A phone without RCS gets the message as SMS or MMS instead, billed at those rates. MMS is capped near 1 MB, so plan a separate, heavily compressed version of the video or send a short text with the URL spelled out. How RCS falls back to SMS covers the mechanics.

How to keep a video under 5 MB

• Length: 15 to 30 seconds.
• Resolution: 720p is plenty on a phone.
• Format: MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio.
• Bitrate: about 1.1 Mbps for video and 128 kbps for audio, which puts a 30-second video at about 4.6 MB.
• Quick math: size in MB is roughly (video kbps + audio kbps) × seconds ÷ 8,000.
• Thumbnail: a sharp still, the same shape as the video, under 50 KB.
• Framing: keep text and faces in the center, since cards crop the edges.