Business Videoconferencing

I was a bit disappointed at last week’s CES Show. There were no big announcements of business conferencing with all the new smartphones and tablets being shown. Sure, there were some teasers with the new Android ‘Honeycomb’ and tablets promising conferencing with 4G networks. But really nothing new with what we have on today’s networks. In reality, 4G won’t be generally available for business users for some years to come- my guess is 2014. So I was expecting to see some competition to Apple’s FaceTime announced last year or Skype’s iPhone videoconferencing application. But from a technology perspective, I can see why:

· The computing power for tablets and phones required to encode and decode is large. Current smartphones don’t have enough power to accomplish this

· Video conferencing is a hog on bandwidth- data costs with current data packages on 3G networks would be huge(the exception being Skype and Fring’s commercial offering)

· Even if you get compression down to 128kbps or 256kbps, it’s too low to provide professional quality service and resolution

· Currently, companies are doing their own thing. Apple has their own encoding and decoding capabilities, RIM has their own for the Playbook, Samsung has theirs, etc. As of this writing, international standards have not been adopted to talk to one another.

Still, there is a market for video conferencing. When you’re dealing with million dollar contracts, you want to be face to face or at least ‘see’ the other person when negotiating transactions and audio conferencing just isn’t enough. Business video conferencing could be a revenue maker and take a big slice out of the business travel industry, which is huge. And with all the new smartphones and tablets coming on to the market, these devices will eventually be equipped with computing power and encoding software to enable video conferencing. Just as video is becoming more main stream with Enterprise, mobile professionals will be demanding video conferencing when mobile with their smartphones or tablets. We’re just not there yet.

Right now, Skype offers video calls on mobile telephones with iPhones and tablet computers with front-facing cameras using both Wi-Fi Internet hotspots and 3G mobile networks. Fring, another free program, allows video calls on iPhones as well as those using the Android operating system and Nokia phones, plus voice calls to fixed phones. The issues are costs primarily, then the limitation of only being able to call other users similarly equipped. But for everyone else who is on contract with smartphones that don’t have front-facing cameras- i.e. most of the mobile population- business video conferencing is a market waiting to be tapped.