Video conferencing in my hotel room – nothing to write home about, I’m afraid

By Sagee Ben-Zedeff

Categories: Innovation, Video Conferencing

July 8th, 2008

Last month RADVISION hosted the SuperOp event here in Tel-Aviv, in the Carlton hotel next to the beautiful Tel-Aviv sea shore. Tsahi, who was part of the organizing team, told me that the Carlton Hotel was actively promoting a new service – personal video conferencing from the comfort of your room.

Video conferencing promotion in the Carlton Tel-Aviv hotel. Photos: Tsahi Levent-Levi.

If you have ever travelled on business (and even on pleasure), and especially if you happen to do it often, you know that your hotel room becomes a home-away-from-home, and sometimes an office-away-from-the-office. Communicating with the people back home- your family, your co-workers – from the privacy of your hotel room becomes a necessity.

Usually what you find in an average hotel room is the old (expensive) wire-line phone. Trying to communicate with the plain old telephone seems very inefficient, not to mention very expensive, especially if you are used to (a little) more advanced method of cummunication.

A typical office-away-from-the-office, in Ramada Seoul. Photo: Tsahi Levent-Levi.

Most new hotel rooms now offer an internet connection, either wire-line or wireless. This is definitely an upgrade for the weary traveler, as you can now use the internet and check e-mails from your hotel room, not to mention use VoIP applications, such as instant messaging or VoIP clients, to communicate with others using voice and even video (assuming you didn’t forget to pack a webcam and a headset). Some hotels have even switched to IP-based telephony.

The Carlton initiative is therefore the next step in the evolution of personal communication – allow hotel guests to use the hotel’s video conferencing infrastructure to communicate using video and voice. Harrah’s, the world famous casinos and hotels chain,  signed an interesting deal with Cisco a few weeks ago, which suggests a similar direction. HP, one of Cisco’s main competitors in the telepresence market, has signed a similar deal with Marriott.

All of these hotel chains are really taking a good step towards  improving their guests’ experience, but still fail to deliver a truly “personal” video conferencing experience. The average hotel guest has to use the system in a designated “business suite”, which makes the whole process quite impersonal and very tedious. Most business guests travel with their laptops, sometimes even with a webcam. So why should I leave my room to make a video conference?   Would it sound reasonable to anyone that a guest should go to a designated “suite” for a phone call?!

Personal video conferencing system in the comfort of your hotel room, with no need to carry anything with you and everyone is just a click away- this is how it should be. However this all sounds too good to be true. And sadly it is. Additionally, another detail has been neglected – the party on the other side of the call needs to have a similar infrastructure.

While enterprises are slowly beginning to deploy video conferencing systems on their premises, video conferencing in the home is expanding much slower. And even those enterprises with a video conferencing system do not necessarily install a gateway to the outside world, so that employees can dial-in from outside of the office. Therefore, the list of available contacts to call, especially when it comes to video but also with voice only, is very limited. That is, of course, if you are not a video conferencing fan like me, with family and co-workers well equipped for the job.

A few years ago an Italian service provider called FastWeb, the first European provider to provide fiber-to-the-home IP network for business and residential subscribers for the use of telephone, internet and TV services, has offered its residential subscribers the ability to connect with others using video conferencing from the comfort of their living room (pdf). By using their standard TV set, the plain old touch-tone telephone and a small video camera adjacent to the TV set (distributed by FastWeb) and connected to the FastWeb set-top box, users simply pressed the asterisk key before dialing a “regular” destination number and the “regular” call was upgraded to a video call.

FastWeb’s personal video communication experience. Taken from an official FastWeb publication.

This sounds great and was implemented in 2002, but unfortunately the service did not become an over-whelming success. In my humble opinion, this is mainly due to a low distribution of cameras, so that subscribers didn’t really have any one to call using video. Communication is a two-way connection, and if only one of the parties is equipped for video, video will not happen.

The conclusion is pretty obvious – when video conferencing will be everywhere, in your organization as well as your home and your mobile handset, there won’t be any hotel room without such a system. It will be just like cable TV or a mini-bar. But until then, it will probably  just be a nice press release, a toy for the weary traveler. Nothing to write home about, I’m afraid.