The rise of video calls and video call monitoring

Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

The rise of video calls and video call monitoring

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Video calling is becoming more prevalent.  Obviously, smartphones have played a huge role here.  There are analyst reports regarding millennials increasing their usage of video calls.  WhatsApp allows video calls, and as of May 2017 subscribers were making 55 million video calls per day.  And Amazon has an Echo with a video screen and video calling capabilities.  And with the Ring doorbell one can talk and see who’s at your door from wherever you are, even your couch.  More and more products have that video capability.  In other words, video calling will continue to increase.

From a personal anecdotal perspective, that is, my discussions with customers, there has been more and more discussion about video monitoring and recording.  These customers understand voice monitoring very well, but had questions about video monitoring.  To me, this shows the planning of video usage in the enterprise. 

From a business perspective, whenever a voice call needed to be monitored or recorded, a video call would likely need to follow the same protocol, which is the root of the questions to me.  Given most video calls are made on IP networks, the actual methodology for monitoring or recording a video call is really no different from a voice call on an IP network.   A voice call is a type of data stream using voice codecs.  A video call with voice is different data stream using voice and video codecs.  A pure video is a type of data stream using video codecs.  So the actual monitoring and recording methodology isn’t that different.  And while there might be security protocols in place for the call, and it might be harder to monitor, it is still possible with the right know-how.  But it’s not as easy as a TDM network that’s for sure.

But video is more complex and requires much more compute power to decode and more storage capacity if you need to record it. 

 

 



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