The long road to mainstream videoconferencing
by Celine Roque
Nowadays, companies are eager to try a wide range of cost-cutting measures to help them weather the storm. Among these is the use of videoconferencing tools to minimize business travel expenses. In the past, implementations were costly and not very reliable, with low quality videos, frequent disconnections and long lag times – factors that certainly contributed to slow adoption. Fortunately, much progress have been made over the years which make it a more viable option.
Using the Internet instead of dedicated lines helped minimize lag, free internal network resources, and bring costs down. The leading players now charge a small fraction of what they once did, and more importantly for small businesses, free and inexpensive solutions such as Skype, iChat, and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro are widely available. For frequent fliers, airline travel savings eclipse any bump in broadband charges to ensure a fast connection.
While it’s not going to replace travel all the time, it makes doing some tasks faster and easier. Doctors can receive patients from remote areas, court hearings are brought closer to people, and professors can give lectures to students anywhere in the world. Congressional work that don’t require physical presence can be done via videoconferencing to reduce travel from their home state to Washington DC, resulting in less tax money spent. In disaster situations where roads are impassable, emergency meetings can be done via video to assess the damage and determine the next move.
With all its advantages, videoconferencing should be a no-brainer, right? Not exactly. We need to be aware that while it’s good for some things, it can be bad for others. Jim Ware pointed to a NY Times article about its ineffectiveness in certain situations, wherein simpler means like the written word may be more appropriate. Kinks have to be ironed out, definitely, but we must also be mindful that different media are good for different things, and it’s up to us to utilize their strengths. I know a lot of people who prefer to send text messages rather than call for sensitive subjects. It’s all about context.
Right now, a lot of things still need to be overcome for the technology to go mainstream. Interoperability is a key factor, as well as complexity and bandwidth constraints. While visual cues can add a lot to communication, some studies have shown that our sensitivity to being in front of the camera can actually be a hindrance. More than any the technological barriers, our greatest problem might be our comfort level. In time, we’ll surely get used to it, and as the younger generations embrace it as the normal way of doing things, videoconferencing will pick up. By then, maybe we’ll wonder how we ever got on without it for so long.
