I’ve already indicated that TV Widgets were a huge hit at CES – they are the first real step in connecting television directly to the internet. Taking it a step further, they may even pave the way for the TV Videophone.
Video conferencing today is all about enterprises: how you reduce the travel necessary for meetings, how you increase communication between your offices, how you deploy video without increasing head count due to video system management issues.
A few years ago, in one of our sales meetings, we had a VP from one of our partners present. I had a short chat with him about video telephony, and he stated that there are two scenarios for video – lean forward and lean backwards:
Lean Forward Video Conferencing is the way video conferencing is done in enterprises – you sit in a room system or in front of a PC screen at your desk. You lean forward and do business. This is how we do video conferencing today the world over.
Lean Backwards Video Conferencing is the social way of doing video conferencing – you sit leisurely, lean back and chat. This is how consumers do it all over. It never caught on. At least not outside the world of Skype.
Consumers Are Key
As long as video conferencing remains a play of large enterprises, it is set for slow growth. You can compare it to presence and instant messaging: people were using it at home as consumers before they started “pushing” their enterprises to let them use such technologies in the office. Today, enterprises provide their own presence and instant messaging services to their employees as communication tools.
Video is probably the same – it won’t really happen at enterprises until it happens at home. And what better place do we have at home than our very own living room, with a nice, large, flat panel television?
In RADVISION, we’ve built reference designs for video phones, based on leading processor vendors such as TI and Intel, for the consumer market. Just recently we were awarded the Internet Telephony IPTV Excellence Award for these specific designs.
So now, when Yahoo! and others are showing off their connected television widgets, it might be time to start thinking seriously about the TV Videophone.
I truly believe that the future of video telephony lies with the consumers. Enterprises will follow as they usually do, and not the other way around.
Tags: CES, communication, consumers, design, IM, IPTV, Presence, reference design, Services, Skype, television, TV Widgets, video conferencing, Video telephony, videophone
Comments and trackbacks
1. neville bradbury | September 1st, 2009 at 11:24 pm
i could not agree with you more. we need to see in the homes the full use of the tv and video / audio conferencing so families, communities and many others can benefit from this technology leap away from the laptop and other devices.
we see the need to also hook home automation into the equation as this will give people the smart house for the future concept which opensoft is looking at doing.
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed