It's a rare technology that has a sales pitch as simple and compelling as videoconferencing. The technique's ability to save the time needed to travel to meetings, the expense of that transport and even the environmental cost of the carbon emissions created by a car or plane seems like a no-brainer.
Yet videoconferencing is far from a mainstream business tool, and the old villain of broadband pricing is at least partly to blame. Historically, most videoconferencing systems preferred to operate over an ISDN connection and prices for that service were for a long time disconcertingly high in Australia. Without a compelling business case that could justify the cost of the required connectivity, videoconferencing struggled to make it onto a corporate shopping list. Videoconferencing equipment has also been worryingly cumbersome. A decade ago, your correspondent attended the launch of a then state-of-the-art videoconferencing rig and was astounded to learn that one of its selling points was a new cart that, for the first time, enabled it to be wheeled through a standard door instead of stranded forever in a single room. Such equipment also relied on proprietary technologies that often made it impossible to stage a videoconference between participants using different manufacturers' equipment.
And even when these five-figure rigs were assembled in the correct configurations and the planets aligned to permit their operation, the experience was often disjointed. Cameras were crippled by cyclopean inflexibility and frustratingly low resolutions, jerky video was de rigeur and unsynchronised sound plagued many a videoconference and created little demand for a repeat performance.
The industry itself admits this experience was unsatisfactory. "The technology was not there and the experience was poor," says Raj Kapoor, BT Global Services' VP for Australasia. "It left a very bad taste with the users."
The same unsatisfactory experience has also bedevilled the more accessible world of desktop videoconferencing, an application that has been touted as capable of replacing the telephone for personal calls since the mid 1990s when applications like CUC ME turned heads with their novel use of the newly available internet and showed how the data network could deliver services like videoconferencing that had long been considered far-future services on telephony networks.
Free desktop videoconferences delivered through instant messaging tools again showed the internet was the obvious home for the technology, with $100 webcams putting videoconferencing within the reach of the average user for at least five years.
Yet the image and motion quality afforded by these devices has seldom been of a standard that would encourage corporate adoption. Those brave enough to use these systems persistently will also have learned that unless some time and effort goes into camera placement and lighting, a videoconference can actually detract from a conversation by removing more nuances than it captures.
And the nuances of a conversation are perhaps the most significant reason why videoconferencing has not yet met its destiny. After all, everyone is familiar with the telephone. We instinctively know that we can use our voices to add layers of meaning and subtext to the words we speak, and that these different layers of meaning can be imparted whether we are sitting behind a desk wearing a suit or doing something else entirely in flagrante delicto during a 'work' from home day.
Mobile phones have only accelerated the versatility and ubiquity of voice as a business tool by making it possible to put on a phone voice on the beach or on the other side of the world, so that one can appear to be hard at work almost anywhere.
Videoconferencing takes away that veneer. Teleconference-attending nose-pickers, unironed slobs and solitaire players have nowhere to hide under the watchful eye of a videoconference's cameras. And even if these folks can curb their anti-social behaviour, they must now be physically present among their peers in order to participate; a barrier to use phone conferencing does not create.
The new wave
Yet such is videoconferencing's potential that the idea refuses to die and is indeed beginning to bloom thanks to some new innovations. The most important of these is the move to IP. Most modern videoconferencing equipment is now entirely happy operating on an IP network.
The availability of connectivity options like SHDSL, which offers symmetrical connections, makes it more than feasible to conduct a videoconference over IP during which all parties can feel confident there will be sufficient bandwidth to ensure a pleasant and reliable communications experience.
Those wedded to ISDN's quality of service features need not be deterred by this move to IP and much equipment offers dual modes of operation. ISDN's cost has also finally fallen to a level at which it is a more comfortable option. "The cost of ISDN meant users saw phone bills in the thousands of dollars," says Tim Chapman, national channel manager, videoconferencing at Unitel. "They'd say: 'Hang on. This is as much as we spend flying to London,'" and use the technology sparingly. "But nationally we have seen these charges drop to $5/min for 384k," a far more affordable level at which videoconferencing makes more sense.
Another important innovation is the H264 compression algorithm. This standard has been adopted by most manufacturers and makes it possible to stage a videoconference between different vendors' equipment. In the hands of managed services providers who act as a technology hub and conference-time coordinator for large multi-party videoconferences, H264 increases the utility of the technology by making it easier to connect parties to a conference.
Plasma screens and high quality projectors help too, as the size and clarity of the images they create make it possible to offer a richer experience that occupies more of participants' field of vision, an important advance from the days where videoconferencing meant hunching around a single television.
And even with these expensive displays in place, a standard boardroom videoconferencing set-up can be acquired for around $25,000: a mere three business class fares to London!
What is it good for?
In business, videoconferencing is now considered a collaboration tool that adds richness to a meeting, but not a tool that allows the full exchange of non-verbal signals that make it possible to build a relationship or conduct sensitive discussions.
"The etiquette is a bit like an international phone call was 10 years ago," says James Anderson, Polycom's country manager for Australia and New Zealand. "You get the slight pause because it can take a while to compress the video and then synch it up with the audio.
"Its role is not to replace face to face meetings," he adds. "It is about facilitating engagement between meetings and achieving more in between face to face meetings. It develops relationships and drives actions from meetings better than a phone call."
Anderson believes value also comes from the chance to "... pull people together 'on the fly'. It is hard to have a spontaneous meeting when people are in different locations. Videoconferencing lets you address an issue quickly. It really facilitates immediacy."
Anderson's arguments assume that there is a pre-existing relationship between participants, a view shared by others.
"Videoconferencing is something that happens between consenting parties," says Jon Farrell, a principal consultant with Dimension Data who specialises in collaboration. "It tells you how important video is: if you have to talk about it before you do it you are communicating on a whole different level. If we have to ask permission before we do it the conversation is running at a higher level again."
But there are times when it is foolish to even contemplate asking for permission.
"When you are trying to establish a relationship a large part of communication is non-verbal," says Tony Wilkinson, director of Microsoft's Information Worker business group. "So videoconferencing is not the right thing for a first customer call. And it's a bit cold for a performance review.
"Where the meeting is important for a relationship that is not the time for a remote technology."
Wilkinson's comments offer more than an insight into the role of videoconferences. By using the term "remote technology" he is also tapping into another role for videoconferencing that is emerging in the wake of its move to IP.
That move is to web conferencing, an update to teleconferencing that uses the internet to blend the end user's desired mix of audio, video and applications. Web conferences can be 1:1 but are more typically one to many in an experience akin to an online seminar.
And it is in this area that analysts see videoconferencing taking its greatest strides in coming years. Gartner, for example, predicts that "... growing demand within organisations for real-time and team-based collaboration technologies will drive the worldwide web conferencing and team collaboration software market to US$681.7 million in 2005, a 16% increase over 2004."
"By 2008, the market is expected to reach $1.1 billion. The markets for web conferencing and team-based collaboration, while still in an early phase of adoption, are converging and transitioning," said the company's VP and research director, Tom Eid. "Vendors are providing more integrated collaboration functionality spanning a variety of content, communication and collaboration technologies."
Whatever your attitude, however, it seems certain that a videoconference of one sort or another is in your future. And while in the past you may have needed to worry about the performance of the technology, the most important thing to worry about next time you face the cameras will probably be the state of your hair!
