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While I am an avid user and proponent of video conferencing (to me this means all forms of visual communications), I don't believe it is going to replace voice calling - at least not all voice calls. As with other communications technologies, it will replace only part of the other means of communications.

You see - sometimes video is just not what we are looking for. Or at least it's not what is necessary to succeed.

This month a group of mobile operators and vendors unveiled an initiative called "One Voice". This initiative is about adopting IMS over LTE by focusing on doing only voice and SMS - what all mobile handsets are capable of doing these days.

I have written about it already on my VoIP Survivor blog and over at NoJitter, but there is one thing I have neglected: IMS started as a big promise - a promise of providing rich multimedia, along with rapid service creation and deployment by operators. It got bloated to the point where it was impossible to implement and deploy over networks, which made a lot of VoIP technologists skeptical about it. I know, as I have been one of them for a long time now. But I think it is changing.

IMS is taking a different approach now, at least from the looks of this initiative, by first focusing on the "simple" stuff of doing regular voice calls and adding text messaging to it; instead of promising the world. From there, it can grow in a more controlled fashion to live up to the dreams that were made around it.

In the words of a good colleague of mine: "they are now investing in 90% of the revenue they are generating, which requires only 10% of the effort".

For me it's a wakeup call, that sometimes all we actually need is "just" voice.

I'll be placing here links once in a while of news items and blog posts that I find interesting and are related to visual communications.

If you have items you'd like to feature here - just email me at tsahil@radvision.com.

Here goes:

• Garrett Smith asks if video conferencing is over-hyped on VoIP Insider - no it isn't. I'd say it is quieter out there than it should be.
• If you are new to video conferencing, then Carol Skyring has a good starting point for you - her Videoconferncing: The Basics. It comes as a new series of posts or an ebook.
• China Unicom is reported to have started a fixed line video telephony service - good luck!
• Jack Loftus brings a videophone concept from 1910 on Gizmodo - did anyone patent it?
• Michael Graves provides interesting information about immersive audio - not really video, but reminded me a lot of 3D video communications. It's in our future, but will take time to get there.

On my VoIP Survivor blog, I've been complaining about the lack of innovation in the video conferencing market.

I'd like to take this a jab at suggesting what can be the next innovation for the video conferencing market.

1. Connectivity between enterprises

It's no secret that video conferencing today is a niche where only large enough enterprises play. You need to have multiple locations around the world in order to utilize video calling. Why? Because there is no easy way today to "dial" calls between enterprise boundaries.

Our industry has created islands of video conferencing equipment - equipment that has no real problem of interoperating with each other, just a minor issue of being able to find each other over the network.

The company that will be able to take this problem and solve it, effectively being a global carrier of video telephony, will be a true innovator that will open the door for far better collaboration and communication between corporate partners, suppliers and customers.

It will make video conferencing a true B2B solution, instead of the B solution it is today.

2. Public Internet

Doing video conferencing? You need a dedicated network for it.

You see, it's not a bandwidth issue. Or a latency one. Though both are painful problems, the main problem is packet loss.

The public Internet has no QoS. Most of the data traversing the Internet isn't sensitive to real time, and works just fine with packet loss, using retransmission mechanisms that are embedded into its main building block - TCP. Video (and audio) is different - it is a lot less sensitive to packet loss. To the extreme.

It means that today's video solutions in enterprises usually require renting high quality, fat pipes between sites - MPLS, where quality of service can be guaranteed. This is both expensive and complex to manage.

A solution that allows doing video calls through the "open" Internet will be true innovation.

3. Real integration with conference rooms

Another option is to focus on the conference room. Today's video conferencing room system units can be considered as an "add-on" to the room. Equipment that is there in the room, to be used when a video call is required.

What if someone took the time to redesign the video conferencing room system to be fully integrated into the conference room, to become an important part of it for most meetings that occur within that room?

This kind of innovation is essential for the growth of the room system segment in our video conferencing market.

Garrett Smith, one of the smartest people writing about VoIP out there, had an interesting post a few weeks ago, about the use of video calling:

"Propelled by the "seeing is believing" phenomena, video phone calling is continuing to increase in popularity and usage.  It's growing adoption, however, is not being driven by traditional consumer calling (as one would think), but by niche applications."

Garrett also provides several examples of such niche applications - some of which I haven't known about until I read his post. While I don't refute the fact that video calling is used for a wide variety of niche applications, I think the analysis is a bit misleading.

I've discussed it here already, when I was analyzing whether  video telephony adoption is a matter of better user experience or more use cases. I still don't know the answer. But I think that video calling is not just a service - it's an enabler.

Our current communications options in regards to in-person communications, is quite varied: we can send snail mail (if we remember how this old technology work...), email, a fax, an instant message, a tweet, do a voice call, leave voicemail, do a video call, collaborate over the web, share our PC screen, etc.

Two way communication done right!

This means that we can now select the best means of communications for a given scenario: we won't be doing a voice call, if an instant message makes more sense, and we won't be using a voice call when seeing the other side is important for the task in hand.

As someone here at RADVISION told me this week, talking heads isn't really video conferencing. It's the fact that you can now call people, see them, move on from there to sharing data and interacting in ways you couldn't before, especially when done across businesses - that's the real deal behind video conferencing.

So yeah - video calling is not replacing phone calls; instead it is going to be used an innovative and more effective way to communicate,, where it will makes sense to add video. Garrett calls it "niche applications", while I prefer to call it "communications services".  The whole package offers various options to make communicating as efficient and effective as possible.

I've promised myself not to talk (or tweet) about Susan Boyle. But I just couldn't resist it, reading how Robert X. Cringely does the math on her YouTube video:

The video file as presented on YouTube is just over seven minutes and 26 megabytes long. Twenty million (and counting!) times 26 megabytes is 520 terabytes or approximately half the size of the Internet Archive. That's 520,000 gigabytes or the equivalent of maxing-out in a single week the monthly bandwidth allotment of 260 co-lo servers at Rackspace.com. Running at top speed for a week would require 1040 such servers to do the job and we haven't even made it to a week yet. That's 520 million-million bytes.

As a VoIP person, the first thing that came to my mind was: how does that fit with visual communications?

We're all hearing about HD Video these days, and how it will bring video telephony/conferencing/communications to the masses. But what will happen if that REALLY does become a reality?

A quick search got me to this small tidbit: in 2006 international voice traffic was almost 500 billion minutes. That's 500,000,000,000 minutes. That's 41 billion minutes a month (or should I say 951,293 concurrent calls?).

Now let's do the math:

Let's assume that only 1% of all calls are video calls. As I've stated in the past, video calling is not here to replace face-2-face meetings or voice calls. 1% is quite conservative, considering that Skype stated that 28% of their calls are video.

1% means 416 million minutes a month.

For HD video let's assume a bandwidth of 1Mbps (125,000 kilobits per second).

That will bring us to 52,000 gigabytes, only 10% of the bandwidth Susan Boyle brought in a single week.

You should note that there's still a big difference between VoIP (that's Video over IP) calls and YouTube content (or any streaming content for that matter). Communications are not static - they're dynamic. You can't store this video on local servers or use CDN architectures. Every bit needs to be sent over the network, across the globe if necessary. This means that traffic is much more chaotic, and you can't really optimize it.

Just think what will happen if, god forbid, video will account for more than those lousy 1% of international calls?

One thing is sure - the guys on the plumbing (Cisco, for instance) would LOVE this to happen. They will be one of the main benefactors if and when this becomes reality.

People have been talking about a "3 screens world" for a while now: the TV, the mobile phone and the PC. Now that media phones are sprouting around us, they are being touted as the 4^th screen. Should we continue to count the screens around us?

We live in a world of gadgets. Every other item we purchase today has a microprocessor built-in, capable of more than what personal computers were able to do a decade ago. Some, many, of these items already have screens on them. And a lot of them are either supporting WiFi or will support in the next couple of years. So why stick with an "n screen" paradigm, when a lot of our "stuff" is going to be connected and have a screen pretty soon?

Think I'm exaggerating?  Take a look at this faucet:

 Smartfaucet for emails (via LikeCOOL)

This may be your 5^th screen...

Modeling the visual communication market has been on my mind for some time now. I think that, as all things in the world, it can be split into 3 segments:

• Large enterprises and organizations
• Small and medium businesses (SMBs)
• Consumers

All are emerging markets, with SMBs being the newest one. All are doing virtually the same thing - using video calls to communicate. And still they are quite different from one another in nature.

Large enterprises and organizations

This can easily be called the traditional video conferencing market. In this segment, I also include medium-sized enterprises who are multi-national. This is the segment where RADVISION, for example, is dominant today.

This market segment is focused on connecting colleagues working in different branches of the enterprise to one another. You won't see a lot (if any) calls done between enterprises.

Most deployments tend to be focused on the organization itself, with its IT or communication department taking care of managing the infrastructure itself.

The types of video endpoints you'll see here will be mainly room systems - located in designated meeting rooms, equipped with a large TV and a camera, connected to a video terminal.

Lately you can see more desktop solutions being deployed alongside the room systems in such organizations - like our very own SCOPIA Desktop. These allow employees to use video calling from their desktops.

This segment is all about high definition these days, and the higher the better.

Small and medium businesses

SMBs, for me, are single office enterprises. They have no real need for video conferencing within the organization besides teleworking, as the rest of the staff is located in the same place. They can, however, use video conferencing to communicate with customers, suppliers and partners.

Most SMBs would probably prefer to have this as a hosted service, with the server located elsewhere and a minimal set of equipment being either purchased or leased for use on site.

In these deployments, 7" videophones and desktop based solutions would work best, if you want to deploy a solution for the employee's desks, while a single room system will be more than enough.

This is a new market altogether, with new video-centric service providers leading the way.

Consumers

Surprisingly enough the consumer market already exists today, and I dare to say it's the biggest of them all. It consists mainly of peer-to-peer video calling using services such as Skype Google Talk.

Today this segment is PC-centric, but for it to really grow, it needs to encompass consumer electronics: migrate from the PC/software domain to hardware-based/entertainment goods, such as videophones, TV sets,set-top boxes, etc.

No.

Not all of them.

It's not that I don't believe in visual communications. After all, I am writing a blog titled "Talking Video". I just don't like the over-hyping our industry is going through with the economy downturn.

Yes - companies are reducing flights. Yes - they can gain from doing video calls instead. No - it is not a replacement for face to face meetings. Oh - and no - Cisco is not threatening the airline business.

A few weeks ago, I read a post by David Beckemeyer criticizing a Cisco research:

The elephant in the room is that even high quality audio and video cannot replicate the rich nature of face-to-face communication. Period.

A lot of David's points are valid, but I think it misses a few points, which I'd like to discuss here.

Video adds context and visual cues

Andrew MacDonald tried to see what's his perceived audio quality threshold. He shows that improving audio quality improves the medium and the cues it provides.

Video adds visual cues which are not available in voice calls. And high definition video gives more visual cues than its SD counterpart.

Video may never reach the "quality" of a face-to-face meeting, but it can greatly improve the quality of other mediums - especially text or voice.

Video can replace face to face meetings

Today, we use our voice phones to communicate with each other. Without phones, we would have had to write emails (SMS?) or go meet people face to face. We resolve to voice, as it is a cheap and easy way to communicate without the hassle of face to face meetings (as we prefer SMS over the hassle of voice communications).

Video can replace yet another layer of face to face meetings, where voice is not enough. And the better the quality of the call (i.e. - moving towards HD and Telepresence) the more meetings you can replace.

It is just a matter of requirements.

Telepresence can't replace face to face meetings

Well, Telepresence can replace many types of face to face meetings, but there are those meetings when it just won't do - they either lack the small talk that get things done or it doesn't have the necessary intimacy. For the rest of the meetings, where Telepresence or face-to-face is not necessary? Just give me a camera and I'll manage from there.

We're going to continue flying around to meet people. Maybe a bit less, but not a lot less. We're going to utilize visual communication to reduce a bit of those flights (on top of the emails, SMS, IM and voice calls), but mainly to improve on our current voice calls.

Video might not be enough to replace all face to face meetings, but if it's used properly, it beats voice calls every day of the week.

I'll be placing here links once in a while of news items and blog posts that I find interesting and are related to visual communications.

If you have items you'd like to feature here - just email me at tsahil@radvision.com.

Here's a first batch:

• TELEPHONY Online that Verizon is planning to provide video conferencing service on their FiOS network "sometime this year". Bill Heilig from Verizon says "If you think about the full video-telephony program, we think it has to be on the TV, but it also has to be on the PC." I couldn't agree more that video telephony has to be on the TV.
• Garrett Smith, a VoIP blogger by heart, is now  to video (or a video believer). If you are not reading his blog - it's time you start. The fact that he is looking closer at video calling goes to show that video is catching on.
• Skype has released version 4.0 officially this month. It is video centric and consumer oriented. VOIP IP Telephony believes it's impressive. I tend to agree.
• NoJitter, another must-read, connects the way YouTube is being used by kids to the future adoption of video communications. Might be a bit far-fetched, but it doesn't hurt the fact that video calling is growing fast. I simply think that the technology has come along far enough for people to adopt it.
• IntoMobile the other day with a Juniper Research report that places video chat as the largest revenue generator for mobile adult content by 2013. This will probably be one of the main drivers for video chats on mobile handsets - these platforms are the hardest to use for video chats and their widespread use depends on adoption of video communication elsewhere. You can get the report at Juniper's site.
• Tim Belfall writes a short piece on telepresence. What interested me is that he doesn't see the adoption of video conferencing assisting mobile video calling. I tend to agree - there are a lot more showstoppers on mobile video calling than other visual communications.
• Gizmodo did a neat iPhone 4G concept, which revolves around visual communications. Worth a look, but still doesn't solve the technical issues of mobile video telephony.

If there's anything I like about Sagee it's the amount of interesting links he sends out on twitter (and via email).

Last week he sent this one out: apparently Apple has filed a patent on a camera that is "hidden" behind a display screen.

If there's anything that makes video calling weird it's the fact that you simply can't keep eye contact.

Before you jump in with your hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars worth telepresence conferencing system equipment, I ask you to think about people like me for a second. People like me, with their laptops and webcams, which constitutes the most common way for people to conduct their video calls, and which is going to be the most used scenario in the corporate domain as well in my opinion.

When using a web camera, usually sitting on top of the screen or on the desk, keeping eye contact is impossible, simply because you need to gaze at the screen to see the people you're talking to, while the camera shows off either your nostrils or your scalp to the rest of the world. I, by the way, prefer scalp.

The original post comes from Zach Spear of AppleInsider who covers this Apple patent. I've bolded out the interesting tidbits:

Submitted in July 2007, the filing details plans for a camera mounted behind a display that could capture an image "while the display elements are in an inactive state (in which the display elements are darkened and at least partially transparent)."

According to the document, a similar, additional system could involve two or more cameras, with software combining the two images into one.  Video would also be possible by cycling the display "between the active state and the inactive state repeatedly".

• I guess they could have called this patent the iContact, if it wasn't already trademarked. Maybe iLook or Apple2C. I see no other reason to place a camera inside the display itself other than fixing the dreadful gaze problem.
• A camera mounted right behind the display, between the eyes of the person that is displayed on the screen, should certainly fix the problem.
• More than one camera is possible. This can bring 3D experience to play in video calls.

While Apple still hasn't whole heartedly committed itself to video telephony (there isn't even a front facing camera on the iPhone, but some believe it will soon be added due to another Apple patent), this may be a sign that they are starting to commit - which makes sense now, since the market shows signs of heading that way.