Living Video: A New Conversation Experience

Next Generation Communications Blog

Living Video: A New Conversation Experience

By Erin Harrison

One of the reasons video is so pervasive today is because of the personal dynamic it brings to conversations and meetings, creating higher-level interactions. Just like a face-to-face conversation, video brings subtleties and other nuances that cannot be communicated in an email or text.

A recent article in Alcatel-Lucent’s Enriching Communications, Living Video Conversations Go Mainstream, details how “living video” gives service providers opportunities to deliver a compelling new conversation experience. It says mobile networks, devices and people are ready for enriched video conversations, and service providers’ are in a position to deliver them.  

Ready, set and go

The authors point out that three converging factors are proof that service providers and users are ready for a new conversation experience via video over not just wired and fixed wireless networks but mobile ones as well.

Networks are ready:  While not yet ubiquitously available but rapidly becoming so around the world, fixed and wireless networks can deliver the big bandwidth, low latency and high quality of service (QoS) needed for mobile video conversations.

Devices are ready: Virtually every smartphone can display video with increasingly good quality including HD.  The race to deploy 4G LTE wireless networks only increases the incentive for users to increase video  streaming and communications.

Users are ready:  They are more than ready.  They are actively engaged.  In July 2011 Skype announced that its video traffic averaged 50 percent, up 10 percent from December 2010. Simply put, people like the human element that video adds to their conversations.

Need more proof?

According to technology research firm Gartner, mobile video telephony increased by 11 percent at the expense of online video calling, which fell by 12 percent. The market has started moving towards mobile video calling due to better mobile broadband and friendlier user experiences.

Armed with this information, the challenge now for service providers is to keep pace with user expectations and continue to accelerate the improvement of today’s video experience. 

This means deploying and leveraging technologies like 4G LTE and IMS to deliver a new conversation experience that helps them:

  • Enrich service offerings
  • Entice subscribers to higher service plans
  • Creatively generate new revenues with new business models
  • Reduce churn

Service providers that capitalize on their advantage in the market to improve on today’s video experience will be in the best position to deliver tomorrow’s living video experience.


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