When will the SMB start to Video-Conference?

In 2007, I blogged endlessly about video (well, 4 times) and its pending rise in the world of communications. At the time I was recently addicted to Skype video, although with few to share the habit with. Fast forward, and thanks to a travel recession and the Skype explosion, video has indeed grown exponentially. But only at two very opposing ends of the market spectrum: the enterprise and the consumer.

The corporate buyer has sought to reap lower travel costs, drive higher impact communicating and capitalize on the innovative business applications video offers. Companies like Tandberg and Polycom are leading the way in this segment. The consumer on the other hand hasn’t had to pay for it and for their purposes, Skype is plenty good – especially since it’s packaged with voice and chat.

What about the SMB? You know, the market with 20 million plus targets in the USA alone. Sure Skype serves some of them and, at the high end of the segment, slimmed down versions of enterprise offerings are showing some life. So what will it take to get at the balance?

If voice telephony is a good benchmark, then we can expect that plenty of choice will be required to address the highly segmented SMB. Voice offerings of all kinds – premise based, hosted and application based have succeeded with small business. Video will likely be no different – and may very well split along the same lines.

It’s got to be easy…
Interoperability is an issue for small business. If a meeting host has to have their guests download, configure software or have IT skills to join a conference, it will never scale. Web conferencing’s slow rise in the SMB has taught us this. So services like TokBox – traditionally a consumer service with it eyes possibly titled up market – seems well positioned to appeal to micro-business (1-5 or so employees) with its browser based approach. In a sense, TokBox’s flash based, zero download platform addresses interoperability; all you need is a camera and a browser and you can join a meeting. I tried it this week and was quite impressed. I also like that it’s approach enables very spontaneous conferencing, another key to mass market adoption.

Web-based video services will also likely need to offer integrated meeting management services like voice conferencing and screen sharing in an easy to use UI to get traction. In fact, maybe we’ll see the full meeting lifecycle covered with the advent of offerings like Tungle or TimeBridge. It’s my opinion that the SMB can only adopt so many new services at once; tying them together thoughtfully in a sum of the parts approach can be good for both buyer and seller.

Note: Similar web based services (ie. ooVoo and SightSpeed) offer formidable alternatives to the SMB today, as Andy Abramson recently covered in his post on SightSpeed’s recent evolution.

…It also has to be good:
Yet there may be other ways to conquer the interoperability issue. I recently chatted with Scott Wharton – an very accomplished marketing executive who had plenty good to do with what Broadsoft became over the last decade. Scott recently launched VidTel, a video calling company that requires external equipment (video phones), yet offers a full plug and play experience. While his current offering strikes me as a prelude to what might lie ahead, what struck me most about my conversation with Scott was his insistence that web based video quality may not be good enough for the SMB.

Scott reminded me that the quality of video calling is limited by processing power at the desk/laptop. So while we think that Skype is very adequate, that does not necessarily make it good enough. I’m actually guilty of using Skype as the benchmark (I did so consciously while trying out TokBox), but for those who have been on an enterprise grade video conference, you’ll know what Scott is talking about.

He may have a point. If – for business application purposes- an SMB wants to invest in video to do things like distance assess patients, present product prototype for development purposes, or even evaluate talent, is web-based quality good enough? And if this is what the SMB will do with video, should the right sales effort not be able extract a meaningful price for this? Worth considering. If the price was right, and the install were to be plug and play, very high quality video experiences could indeed open up some rich, vertical markets that browser based video likely would not serve.

Note: There are surely other good equipment based offerings in the market, although I don’t know of any who can yet claim interoperability without the additional cost of a bridge.

Long Tail Ahead?
Getting to market for these divergent approaches will take time, money and properly conceived go to market strategies. The web-based vendors would appear to have wonderful partners waiting in the wings in the form of the hosted telephony/collaboration providers (even if many of those themselves are only beginning to scale), while a hardware/network solution may need to go direct selling first. But once the market proves itself, a variety of solution providers may welcome the opportunity to bring these visual communications solutions to their customer base.

Either way, the video market for the SMB is coming. The ramp – already a few years in – may turn out to be as long as the tail vendors are chasing. I for one will keep following it, but would love to hear what you think.