Idea Center: Video Telephony 2.0

We live in an age where hand-phones and therefore mobile telephony is almost ubiquitous. Human communication originated as a face to face personal interaction. When long distance telecommunication first came in, it started by offering "Message" grams Western Electric's Picture Phone in the early years of the Telegraph. Later, Telephony started adding one more element of true human communication, "voice". To this date Telephony and its various forms remain unchanged.

The Second aspect of Human Communication which involves actually seeing and experiencing has also made an entry as "Video Conferencing" (not Video Communication.) Owing to the technology and high entry costs, such technology had restrictions. In 1968 Video Conferencing was a beginning and a "sci-fi" idea shown in movies that was being realized through technology. Incidentally the 8fps limit (frames were drawn horizontally then) was established with this technology.

In the 1970s, the first generation AT&T Picture Phones first came to the market. This is the defining moment of "Video Telephony 1.0" These phones were predicted to sell by the millions in 1980, but they never took off. In the meanwhile Multi-point Video Conferencing Technology became popular and became a "high-end" niche solution that was available to big corporate players.

Their competitors like Western Electric followed. But there were several reasons for the failure of "Video Telephony 1.0" including the lack of technology.

By the late 1990s as personal computing moved closer and closer to mobile telephony, Japan, specifically NTT DoCoMo made a bold move to introduce Video Telephony in mobile phones. With predominant CDMA technology and entrant CDMA2000 and CDMA 2.0 standards, this was made possible. This was the beginning of "Personal Video Conferencing" and therefore of "Video Telephony 2.0." (These aren't catch phrases and merely ones I am coining in this blog conversation.) The Mobile version of Video Telephony didn't make it too fast, thanks to high demand on battery power consumption, processing power usage, heat and fluctuating wireless network bandwidth. Anyone familiar with NTT DoCOMO's FOMA Buzz would know about this.

Mobile Video Telephony has made much headway since then. The Nokia N95 8GB which I carry has a VGA CMOS Senor based Camera dedicated to Video Calls. This is apart from a 5 MegaPixel still-shot camera which it has for stillshots and makes it as good as carrying a Digital Photo Camera. But Mobile Phone manufacturers (rather than just the service providers) have also worked towards realising this solution better.

The stage is finally set for bringing Video Telephony back to the desk. Today you could have Video Telephony on your Desktop. This has been made possible by the marriage of IP Telephony which was originally designed for voice communication with Video imaging and streaming. This marriage initiated the beginning of "Video Telephony 2.0"

What were the first steps in Video Telephony 2.0?

A Strong Communication solution for the Deaf and Dumb through Sign Language cannot exist without Video Telephony. As the user base is smaller, this would still define itself as a niche requirement.
Business communication across multiple offices of the same companies or partners can be enabled by Video Telephony.

Body Language is said to be a strong Trust Driver. We are judgemental of people on first sight.
Eye contact is considered by many experts to be a powerful form of expression.

Watch any of the recent movies and you will notice cameras using more eye contact to capture emotions of actors better. If you're into art films you would have seen this.

Seeing is Believing in this fast paced world.
The only way all of the above could be achieved was through Personal Meeting unless there was a compelling alternative.

By the early 1970s a trend of migration to Cities and in the case of South East Asian and Asian nations, migration to the west began separating a once strongly knit family structure in society. This created a strong need for Overseas communication and Urban-Rural communication.

This necessitated video communication of the new "Nuclear" family with their close relatives.
Telephonic communication slowly reduced costs to accommodate this strong need.
The out-of-sight is out-of-mind mentality drove people to want to get in touch in person making frequent visits to their home-towns and their home-countries.
Video Telephony was finally expected to quell this need by providing seamless Audio/Video communication.

By the Year 2000, the Internet became accessible in almost all the countries and places. The PC to access the Internet reached levels of affordability and instantly became a tool of communication for exchanging e-mails, photographs and greeting cards.

Video Telephony began with "Instant Messaging" clients that started providing this service if the PC was equipped with Sound Record/Playback for voice-chats and "Web Cameras" for video-chats.
Internet Bandwidth began normalizing over different locations of the world. What started as 56.6kbps ceiling for modems began expanding beyond that limit to create the new Broad-band 128kbps or higher transport streams.
Several families started linking again using this technology and "Road Warriors" in business outfits also started experimenting with Voice and Video chat using the PC as a platform.

If any one were to remember the advent of CNN, one would immediately associate it with the first war in the Gulf. Live Video was available from a war-zone for the first time.

This was made possible through "Video Telephony 2.0" using Satellite communication.
The first use of such equipment was interestingly coupled with military-grade "Night Vision" technology.
Today many News Channels use Video Telephony equipment that use Satellite transmission for instant communication of news, probably the one reason why news takes lesser and lesser time to reach us. Field equipment is light enough to fit in a suitcase along with a satellite transceiver. Anyone watching National Geographic's coverage of Superstorms would notice how such equipment is used to transmit live video.

After several steps of revival, the "Video Telephony 2.0" now wants to make it to our Office and Home Desktops and take the role of an independent accessory. To avoid information cramming I've decided to focus on this role in another post. But here's a preview of what you could expect on your desks soon, except you might start wondering, "How will Video Telephony improve my productivity?"

You could watch for the new $300 gadgets that are tied with IP Telephony services and offer Video Telephony. Here's a recent (19-Sep-2008) launch by Asus, the AIGURU-SV1. You could click on the picture below for specifications.

For those who are impressed, that's a 7" Wireless Videophone from ASUS at $300. NTT DoCoMo also has desk models today which combine IP Telephony and 3G Technology (that once spurred their FOMA buzz) with touchscreens. Click on the link for specs here too.

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