How can electronics designers capture the
hearts and minds of the average consumer
with video chat products? The concept of
combining video and voice in two-way consumer
communications devices is nothing new. For decades,
there have been numerous attempts at bringing viable video
telephony solutions to the market.
Resulting products have ranged from the 1980s AT&T
standalone video phone with its 33.6-kbit/s analog modem to
recent broadband-based models such as 8x8’s Tango, which was
announced this year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas. Yet despite all the technology and hard work, none of
them has clicked with average consumer. The reasons behind
this lackluster performance are technical and behavioral.
MORE BANDWIDTH, MORE PRIVACY
It’s no mystery that transmitting video requires much fatter
pipes, or higher bandwidth, than voice. One of the key difficulties
in achieving high-quality video communication has been
the lack of sufficient bandwidth to customers’ homes.
While Japan and Korea lead the world in broadband penetration
and available throughput, most consumers have been
limited to sub-megabit connectivity. This is particularly true
for upstream network throughput, which is as important as
downstream throughput in two-way video communication,
due to the inherent symmetry in this application.
Another key issue has been the cost of the application. The
bill of materials for building a standalone video phone has been
relatively high, in line with the cost of building a high-end cellular
phone. In addition, video’s lack of ubiquity has severely
limited the number of people who could communicate with
one another.
In addition to the technical and practical issues surrounding
the home use of video communication devices in the past, there
has always been a social barrier stemming primarily from privacy
concerns. Most people have reservations about allowing
others to “see” them in their homes. Although all devices sold
have always given full control over who is permitted to establish
a video call, the typical non-tech-savvy consumer never
seemed to fully trust this camera-enabled gadget!
That said, during the past few years, several significant factors
have helped to improve market conditions for the adoption
of video telephony in the consumer space. On the technical
front, new and advanced video compression standards such
as H.264 are enabling high-quality, real-time video to be transmitted
across the Internet—although the upstream bandwidth
for residential broadband service is still quite limited in most
regions of the world.
H.264 ASICs are enabling resolutions up to HD (1280 by
720 at 30p) at a 384-kbit/s average bitrate to be transmitted
in real time. This is significant progress relative to some of the
legacy standards, such as H.263, where a standard definition
(720 by 480 at 30p) video sequence would consume 768 kbits/s
to achieve real-time, good quality video communication.
WHAT’S NEXT
Perhaps the most critical trend is the emergence of instant
messaging (IM) and social networking sites, which are shaping
the new paradigm for video communication by addressing several
of these issues. The popularity of IM sites, most of which
have video chat capability, has greatly helped to transform the
ubiquity issue. Users with a computer and Internet access are
only seconds away from being able to video chat through a
simple application download.
As these IM applications become more popular, they’re more
likely to find their way into consumers’ living rooms and onto
their HDTV sets. Because of their popularity and high quality
for viewing video content, HDTV sets are being increasingly
targeted by IM-based video chat applications.
This creates a tremendous opportunity for consumer electronics
companies as well as service providers to offer IMbased
video phone functionality in game boxes, set-top boxes,
and even TV sets for instant access to a large community of
PC-based IM subscribers.
The service providers are especially well-positioned to take
advantage of this new opportunity since they already have
business models for subsidizing equipment in return for service
contract commitments. If things fall into place, service providers
will be able to remove a big barrier to the adoption of the
technology—the cost.
A recent survey found that more than 25% of all PC-based
calls made online are video calls, so the concerns surrounding
video communication and the related privacy issues are starting
to fade. There seems to be a behavior shift led by the members
of the YouTube and Facebook generation, who seem willing to
share their personal lives with the rest of the online community
in the form of user-generated content.
Given all of these factors—the behavior shift, the growing
ubiquity of online video, and the adoption of high-quality yet
low-cost video compression technology—the era of widespread
consumer video chat may have finally arrived.