I had this post in the oven for a while now. And when I say “oven” I mean the area where posts are written, in the deep dark areas of my mind. I’ve been waiting for a chance to bring it to light, an excuse to come forward and say it out loud:

IT AIN’T ABOUT THE RESOLUTION!

But then came this innocent-looking-yet-evil-as-usual comic strip from my favorite artist, Randall Munroe aka xkcd, and I thought: There we go. Here’s the chance I was waiting for.

With All Due Respect To Resolution…

I’m not interested in HDTV. Not here, at least (for the record, I don’t have it at home either). Here I’m interested in High Def in relation to video conferencing, and after almost 6 years of HD this and HD that the revolution is at its final stages: every endpoint being sold out there today is HD – 720p at least, 1080p most likely. We have it, the competition has it – this is no longer an “if” or a “when”.

So now, when we can stop the resolution race for a while (until the next big thing?) and look at what we accomplished, I have to tell you I’m not impressed. Sure, we have these new, beautiful high-def screens in every meeting room. But has it really changed the way we are doing our business? Are people using video conferencing more because of the resolution?!

Honestly, and I’ve been talking to plenty of people about it – the answer is NO.

Sure, you get a “life-size image”. An “immersive” experience. It’s at least 9 times bigger than CIF. All this is true. But if you want to compare what we had 6 years ago to what we have today, you should be comparing apples to apples, not cherries to watermelons.

Comparing Apples to Apples

In 2005 we had H.263 video in 4CIF resolution running at 512Kbps. Today we have H.264 video in 1080p running at 4Mbps. Sure, the latter looks A LOT better. But is it the resolution?!

All around me, friends (who are not Joel Stein) are telling they’re using visual communications clients from Skype, Google and their likes, and they are enjoying the experience a whole lot.

Even Steve Jobs, god of all user experience, thinks using a mobile handset (with VGA resolution) is good enough. Definitely better than those dark old days, when you couldn’t even see who you were talking to.

So what has changed? A great deal of things:

• We have better network connections – less packet loss, better QoS.
• We have bigger network connections – more bandwidth, download and upload.
• We are using better codecs – H.264 and its “step-brothers” are dominating the visual communications market.

What hasn’t changed? The resolution. Most people are using CIF or 4CIF for their personal video calls. Yes, just like we used to do 6 years ago. And I haven’t heard one complaint about the resolution.

One may argue that in CP mode, when you want to see more participants, 4CIF is not enough. I am willing to accept that. But to justify the entire industry moving to 1080p, using more expensive equipment, spending thousands of dollars on bandwidth, with CP layouts? Sounds a bit absurd.

This may sound like blasphemy. And in any way this is, as I said, a done deal. But we might want to take something from all of this – it’s the experience, not the technical details that count. It’s the better codec, dealing better with unmanaged networks, planning a better infrastructure, allowing for better management that counts.

Then, and only then, you can talk about resolution.