Video Conferencing

The next big thing again-Video Conferencing

I have been pondering the state of video conferencing a lot lately. In fact, it has been on my mind for about 15 years, ever since I sat next to a senior executive of a major airline on a cross-country flight in 1995. I asked him a question I often ask executives I meet as I try to get a pulse on what drives them. I asked him ³what keeps him up at night.² His answer was ³video conferencing.² He said that as video conferencing or video telephony becomes more mainstream, he worried that it could have a major impact on airlines. He said that business people could eventually opt to do their meetings via video and not hit the road for internal corporate meetings or go to meetings with their clients at their site. He feared that video conferencing could eventually reduce business travel significantly if this happened.

Video telephony has been the next big thing for decades. The concept was first shown to the world at the Worlds Fair in NYC in the early 1960¹s by AT&T. And each decade since there has been major attempts at trying to get video telephony to the point where it could become part of the normal fabric of personal communications.

But the obstacles have been enormous. Besides being quite costly (Cisco¹s Telepresence rooms run between $300K- $500K per site) the broadband pipes have just not been in place to bring quality video telephony to the masses.

And even while point-to-point video conferencing has come down in price, they still cost between $10-$50K per location, plus bandwidth charges, making them relatively costly for most business to deploy.

But I sense that after 50 years of trying to make video telephony a reality for use by everyone, there are some bright spots on th...

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...nce she was born. In fact, the other day I called her on a normal telephone and she asked why I did not use video and told me that my call was old fashion. Her generation and the teenagers of today use things like Skype video and many other simple video services often and to them it is the norm. And with things like Facetime time being built into smart phones, this generation will drive video calls into their mainstream world quickly.

But I do believe that we are closer to seeing that AT&T vision of the Worlds Fair finally realized. The technology is finally getting close enough to make it possible to do a video call almost anytime and anywhere. To me the only big question is whether my generation or my son¹s generation will embrace it and make it a normal part of the way we communicate, or will it take Gen Y and even younger generations to make it go mainstream.