Business trips are among the terrorists’ victims. A Sept. 18 survey of U.S. corporations found that 58 percent planned to reduce travel in the coming months. And it’s not all top-down decisions. One New Jersey firm hired Video Corp. of America to set up a videoconference in place of a long-scheduled meeting because, says VCA’s videoconferencing coordinator John Zinevich, “they had a lot of people who said, ‘We don’t care. We’re not going to fly even if you make us’.” But sales meetings still have to take place. Client contacts can’t be halted. So companies are turning to technologies like remote file-sharing to make connections. In the new environment, videoconferencing seems poised for its long-awaited takeoff.
For years the technology has been just around the corner. But a combination of factors frustrated it. Some were technical: jerky, Chaplinesque motion; audio out of sync with video. Others were psychological. “The overriding reason that videoconferencing has not been widely adopted is that people could travel,” says Jaclyn Kostner, who conducts workshops on virtual team communication for clients like Microsoft and IBM. “We like to press the flesh, go out to dinner, create relationships.”
That may be a luxury now. Roopam Jain, an analyst for market-consulting and training company Frost & Sullivan, says that in the weeks since the attacks videoconferencing-service providers have reported as much as a 350 percent rise in use. Zinevich says the business is up fivefold. The increase may be permanent. “The cost of videoconferencing is 25 percent of what it was three years ago,” says David Berlin, executive VP at VCA. “The cost of travel has not come down.”
The technology is better, too. A typical high-end setup today uses three ISDN lines, with a combined transmission rate of 384 kilobits per second. This translates to something like television’s idea of full-motion video: 30 frames a second. Audio and video, says Zinevich, are “acceptably” in sync. But all this presumes the successful operation of three independent systems: the gear inside a company’s facility, the infrastructure in the building and the external network. “You could have the world’s greatest tin cans,” says Lew Jaffe, COO of PictureTel, a leading producer of PC-based video systems, “but if you’re using a really thin thread, you can’t hear the voice. You need everything.”
The next wrinkle is the post-ISDN world of the Internet, in which per-call charges disappear. Does your company need to integrate data and communications? One answer is video over IP (Internet protocol). A problem: video hogs bandwidth, and will not operate smoothly over the open Internet, requiring information to travel over QoS (quality of service) lines. All these are available in most areas, but they need advance setup. Videoconferencing can also take place via cable modem, but service is degraded in areas of high local use. Still, says Andrew Davis of Wainhouse Research, “if you’re talking to a colleague or a relative in Texas or California or Germany and it’s a free video call, you might be quite willing to put up with an occasional hiccup.”
Videoconferencing is an adjunct to human contact, says Robert Hagerty, CEO of Polycom Inc., a leading producer of audio and video technology. “Human beings are still social beings. They need to have brainstorming sessions, create personal bonds, eat together. But this technology allows you–once you’ve established those relationships–to maintain them. Intervening discussions become much more productive because you’re seeing someone’s face, you’re seeing their body language.”
Some see videoconferencing as an actual improvement. “We have the technology so that a team in digital space can rival a team in physical space,” says Kostner. “Teams can be more productive and faster than they could by traveling–if the technology is in place and people know how to use it.”
The key, she adds, is overcoming obstructions that hamper communication. She instructs her clients to make sure the video camera is focused close on the participants’ faces and shoulders. She discourages blank white walls as backdrops and says that plants or photos help viewers concentrate on the speaker. Further, no one should be left out of the videoconference, for example, by being relegated to the phone. He or she will eventually drop out.
In spite of significant advances and impressive technology, Davis points out that videoconferencing is an industry that has yet to make a profit: “In the last five years, we had a roughly 20 percent unit growth in the industry, year over year. But the revenues for the industry are completely flat–zero percent growth. And that’s killed some of the players in the industry. It’s not an industry that makes money.”
But it is one of the only industries that posted increases when the New York Stock Exchange opened the Monday after the attacks. Polycom stock was and is up about 33 percent; PictureTel rose 13 percent when the market opened and increased to 35 percent when it received regulatory approval for its planned acquisition by Polycom. The future? “This is an industry that has consistently failed to deliver,” says Davis. “I liken it to the Boston Red Sox: every fall, the cry around Boston is ‘Wait until next year!’ "
