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With the InfoComm show pending this week in Vegas, it’s announce-ware time in the visual communications space. But this time around, this is not hype.
Video’s hot in seemingly every corner of the industry, including mobile thanks to the FaceTime announcement today from Apple – and a well timed release of data from GigaOM, promising an almost 10-fold increase in the number of video calls between now and 2015. This foot-to-the-floor acceleration will be in no small way driven by the proliferation of devices from which one can make and receive video calls.
So all this frothy video talk left me a little nostalgic today. You see, over the years I’ve used this blog on more than one occasion (16 to be exact) to pimp video – and its rosy future – in some form or another. For a while there, I didn’t have many takers. I argued that like voice mail and other communication technologies before it, use video enough and you will be a convert.
Yet even if its time has finally come, the look back at its journey does serve as a healthy reminder of just how long a market can take to make. Even in these supposedly faster times. With this in mind, I decided to take a quick peek at my earlier posts that alluded to, prognosticated about or simply threaded in visual communications tongue-in-cheek. Here are five I, and the readers, liked best. They date all the way back to early 2007:
The Year even Clooney lost out to Video…
When will the SMB start to Video Conference…
What to wear to a Video Conference….
Make no mistake, video still has some mountains to climb and with each conquered will come many healthy monetization opportunities: The SMB is only getting started, only a small percentage of web-conferencers use video, and even if tele-medecine makes for great 60 Minutes’ pieces – it too has plenty of market yet to penetrate. Still – as InfoComm visitors will surely attest – it’s good to be in video right now.
Sorry I won’t be in Vegas. It would have been fun to see all my ranting come true.
Update: Without my prompting, colleague Thomas Howe over at Voyces ran a post today on the arrival of the video market. Worth a look….
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Larry works with entrepreneurial companies in voice & visual communications to help them grow their business. 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice post Larry. In addition to those news items, Cisco announced last week a $500 “telepresence appliance” for the consumer – but also could be great for the SME market. Sprint also announced their entree into video conferencing with the HTC Android-powered EVO but got drowned out by Mr. Jobs.
After a long hype cycle, video conferencing is finally moving into the mainstream. It’s not a matter of if anymore but how, when and from whom.
Scott
I’m convinced that one of the biggest barriers to wider adoption of video is the lack of eye contact. Until that is resolved, video will always cause problems because it does not facilitate natural communication.
Jim – you make a good point. I had heard a rumor at one point that Apple was planning to embed the camera right in the screen to correct this. I catch myself sometimes trying to look at the camera rather than the screen for the benefit of the other person, but can’t sustain it. Thanks for dropping by.
Face-to-face communication involves many subtle signals that relate to eye contact. Being unable to look someone in the eye can signal all sorts of things, such as insecurity or deception. The effect of being unable to make eye contact generally gives a negative perception of the other person.
Even putting a camera in the middle of the screen might not do it. If, for example, the window with the other person’s face is in the top corner of your screen, and your camera is in the middle of your screen, your eyes will still not appear to be looking at theirs. Instead, when you look at their face, your camera will show you as looking slightly up and to one side. You’ll appear to be looking at their hairline or forehead.
A psychological barrier exists that we can’t quite put our fingers on, but is nevertheless uncomfortable. We can sense that there’s something subtly wrong; something unnatural about the interaction, even if we can’t articulate what it is. Try to imagine handling a tricky negotiation over a video connection where you can’t look the other person in the eyes. It’ll feel all wrong. Next time you’re talking in person to someone about video, stare at their chin or forehead while you’re speaking to them, and see how long it takes before the conversation feels uncomfortable. I guarantee it will weird them out in less than one second, even if you explain to them exactly what you are doing (simulating a video call).
I recall reading somewhere about a project that uses two cameras, one on either side of the screen, and the computer then interpolates the data from each camera to determine where the eyes are looking in relation to the screen. The computer then uses that information to calculate the position of a virtual camera on the screen, and then constructs an image of your face as if it was coming from that virtual camera. I wish I could remember where I read that; it sounded like an interesting approach.
My feeling is that until the eye-to-eye contact problem is solved, video will never succeed as a serious method of face-to-face communication. The technology has existed for as long as there has been television (over 50 years!), and the industry has been promising it for as long, and yet it has never succeeded in the way we would expect it to. Shouldn’t everyone have a video phone by now?
Video will take off like a rocket once eye-to-eye contact is sorted out. Until then, it’ll sell here and there, but nobody will ever really trust it. It’ll just feel wrong somehow.