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For Those Who Can Afford to Pay, the Video Conference Grows Up

Video conferencing systems have matured so that unobtrusive equipment allows face-to-virtual-face meetings. Those who use it say the saved travel expenses outweigh the steep costs to deploy the systems.

By C.G. Lynch

November 01, 2007 — CIO — Accenture always had an interest in video conferencing. Employees debate about the exact date when the first camera and monitor landed in a meeting room, but by most accounts, Accenture has tried to add video conferencing to its arsenal of collaborative technologies since the early 1990s. However, due to lagging technology, video conferencing never resonated as the world’s largest consulting firm might have hoped.

Television monitors, with bad pictures and big cameras mounted on top of them, didn’t cut it. When conversing, meeting participants often had to look straight into a camera, rather than at a person; the camera’s presence would dominate the experience and cause the person to forget what it took to run a good meeting, to collaborate on work projects. “The technology, historically, had great promise,” says Frank Modruson, CIO at Accenture. “But the delivery didn’t live up to expectations.”

Analysts and researchers say Accenture’s experience mirrors that of most companies that have explored the technology in the past. As it turned out, perfect, crystal clear video conferencing happened only in Hollywood productions. The most celebrated example is Star Trek, in which the captain frequently asked his lieutenants to put an alien life-form traveling in another spaceship “on screen.” But on the planet Earth, amidst the sobering halls of the corporation where the demands of technology can’t be faked, video conferencing just couldn’t cut it. Slow connection speeds and old clunky setups proved unreliable and, in many cases, required hours of IT support for a one-hour meeting.

After many years of promises, experts on collaborative technologies believe video conferencing has finally grown up. The advances could have a huge effect on international businesses looking to minimize travel costs—and the human wear and tear that comes with travel. Better connection speeds, coupled with the use of high-definition monitors like the kind people drool over on a trip to their neighborhood Best Buy, have upgraded the experience. The result: While very expensive (some video conference rooms are priced as high as $300,000), the technology could reduce travel budgets and boost productivity by letting people collaborate with one another from the comfort of their home offices.

Remember Out-of-Sync Pictures and Sound?

Video conferencing has been around for a while now. Television stations and the military have used it for decades because they had the huge budgets and technical expertise required to install and run it. Commercial video conferencing dates back to the mid-1980s, according to Claire Schooley, an analyst at Forrester Research. Throughout most of the 1990s, video conferences connected over Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN) lines. Since ISDN lines were expensive, IT departments would often devote only 25 percent or 50 percent of the line to a single video conference. Because of this, users of video conferences would sometimes experience "packet drops," which occur when packets of data traveling over the wire fail, or take entirely too long, to reach their destination. It caused a disparity between the sound coming through the speaker and the person's lips moving onscreen. (This reflects a correction to the originally posted version of this story. See the corrections page for details.)

 

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