A flurry of articles — evidently derived from the same Associated Press story, but each saying something a little different — reports that Wake Forest and a few other universities are interviewing prospective students by Skype/webcam videoconferencing. Cisco’s intensified push into the home networking and consumer electronics markets has been interpreted by some as being “really” about home video conferencing. Does this mean video conferencing is finally going to be a big deal?Obviously, video conferencing has been heralded since the 1960s, if not before — especially if, as I did, you grew up near Disneyland and later became a science fiction fan. From that standpoint, Ars Technica’s skepticism could be said even to understate the point:
Video conferencing is one technology that’s been just over the horizon for at least two decades; I’m not convinced it will suddenly become a must-have feature for consumers; and how broad is the market, really, for folks who want to conduct conversations from the couch while staring at a giant shot of grandma’s head on the HDTV?
The traditional reasons video conferencing has never taken off can be summarized as:
- It’s expensive and awkward
- If you really care about seeing the other person, it’s a poor substitute for actually being there
Do you really want to have to dress up to use the telephone anyway?
But for many uses, the first two can be solved by better technology, and the third may be partially irrelevant. Suppose you view a video conference as a substitute to an otherwise necessary/desirable formal meeting — job interview, college interview, parent/teacher conference, doctor appointment, client meeting, etc. Then sufficiently cheap and effective video conferences might indeed be the next best thing to being there.
Or would they? In fact, face-to-face meetings ARE being replaced at high rates with technology-aided ones. Phone calls are the most obvious examples, but now we have web meetings as well, where slides and the like are shared too. (Although that can be taken too far.) My volume of business travel is clearly less than it would have been with the same mix of clients 10-15 years ago. (Back then I kept myself sane by working with fewer, bigger companies.) There are some things the technology doesn’t work well for yet — sharing “white board” drawings, for example — but specialized apps for things like that are probably more advanced, affordable, and accessible than general decent-frame-rate desktop video conferencing.
My guess is that we won’t be seeing really widespread video conferencing for a while yet. Digital cameras only took off in popularity when their quality and affordability got to the no-compromises level; I think the same will be true of casual interchange of video images.
