Video everywhere

It can be a bit unnerving how quickly technologies proliferate, and it seems to me that the timescales involved are getting a lot shorter.

Take email, for example. The first of the killer apps, it took ages to get off the ground. Indeed,  I can remember installing some of the first email systems in the UK way back in the seventies. I can also recall teaching corporate users how to send and receive messages, which seems a little odd some 30 years later when, seemingly, every man and his dog now has an email account.

Text and instant messaging took far less time to get going, social networking came out of nowhere in what seems like the blink of an eye and now it looks like it’s the turn of  video.

Think about it. Video is to be found almost everywhere these days. Just about every website has a clip or two of some kind, often in the adverts for goodness sakes. Players are everywhere and it doesn’t take much of an investment to make videos yourself. Just a cheap webcam or a mobile phone with a camera built in, plus a few minutes to work out how to use YouTube.

All of which kind of begs the question, why is video conferencing still so expensive and so difficult? After all, with the proliferation of personal video technology,  barriers to the use of video conferencing are disappearing fast and it’s about time vendors woke up to what’s happening and made their products more accessible.

Some are doing just that so, if my theory is correct, video conferencing should be commonplace any day now.

This article is  written by Alan Stevens and sponsored by Avaya. The opinions reflected in this piece are solely those of Alan Stevens and may not reflect those of Avaya management