A couple of months ago a screenshot of the control panel of Doc Brown’s Delorean time machine in Back to the Future II circulated on the internet with the date of the day. Turns out it was a hoax, and a recurring one for that matter because the real date that Marty and Doc fly out to in that movie is October 21st, 2015.
Still, that got me thinking about the expectations that science-fiction movies and books have, in a way, implanted in us. A lot of people will talk about flying cars when asked what technology they expected as kids would be commonplace in the 21st century. But one of the most recurring tropes of science-fiction movie sets is video communications. Spies (1928) is the earliest I could find, but there are many more: Forbidden Planet (1956), A Space Odyssey (2001), Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), Men in Black (1997), Minority Report (2002), Avatar (2009), etc.
And, of course, Back to the Future II, in the famous scene where the Marty from the future gets sacked by his boss over video communication (in a strangely prescient scene reminiscent of Up in the Air (which, sadly, wasn’t a science-fiction movie…)
And yet, if we look around us, we’re very far from video communication replacing telephony. Sure, there’s Skype and Google’s Hangout, but use remains very PC-centric and therefore far from ubiquitous. Did you know for example that only 40% of Skype communications were video enabled? Facetime, some will argue, is not PC-Centric. That’s true, but is it used much? Apple doesn’t publish any data about it that I could find (which, knowing Apple, could be an indication that usage isn’t that high, otherwise they’d be clamoring these numbers.) And even if it is heavily used, its spread is limited to camera-enabled iOS devices, which is a niche market in itself (albeit a big and profitable niche).
So while video communication has been conceptualized a long time ago and is technically feasible today, it’s not being widely adopted. Why is that? I think it comes down to three aspects: a business aspect, a practical aspect and a generational aspect.
The most natural players to have brought this to consumers, namely ISPs, have repeatedly failed to do so. Look at this 1993 AT&T advert: it shows various futuristic service concepts that AT&T claimed (at the time) would be marketed by them. Video communication is amongst those: we see a woman saying goodnight to her kid over a public video communication booth. But AT&T didn’t deliver, and neither did the dozens of other telcos who tried to bring video phones into the home. Why? Because they got bogged down with issues around the device for video communication. They tried to impose a dedicated (and expensive) video-comm terminal, which limited the potential market to so few households that the network effect that normally drives adoption of communication services could never take place. Cisco tried to address the same issue with its ümi device, but they made the same mistake and had to discontinue the product. The irony is that the most legitimate device for video communication (mobile phones excluded) is the TV, and in many markets telcos and cablecos still control the TV through their set-top-boxes. Ultimately, the errors of the past were so painful that telcos have become gun-shy. Meanwhile, video communication is slowly moving to other devices and being delivered without the ISPs’ collaboration. That may raise quality of experience issues, but the idea that video communication is ‘not very good but free’ is gaining ground.
Even if the telcos had done it right and been successful though, there may be a practical issue that would slow down massive adoption of video communication anyway: for those who like me are of a generation that predates the internet, our relationship to our own image is still uneasy. The idea that we are being looked at is not something we accept readily. Therefore, while we might be happy to set up a video conference for a family call or to see our kids, we’re a lot more reluctant to let that perceived invasion of privacy take over more mundane calls. It’s actually an interesting conundrum, because I suspect there’s a lot more trust in a good quality video call because of eye contact. Maybe that’s what scares us a bit ...
For younger generations who were born in an environment filled with moving pictures nearly 24/7 there doesn’t seem to be such reluctance. A tech friend of mine recently told me how his daughter would set up a Skype call on her iPad to do her homework with one of her friends. The two girls don’t talk much, they just use the video as an emulation for presence. I suspect that this generation will embrace video communication in all its forms.
Which means that there isn’t much time for service providers to stake their ground in that territory if they think it’s worth doing. Otherwise, video communications will be delivered over the top. It’ll be too late then to complain that it’s a data hog!