I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a home phone anymore. It is a little funny to fill out online forms where a “home phone” is required. I have put in all kinds of things just to get the form to close so I could get my free whatsit.
Looking at the computer I am writing the article on, and the MacBook Air right next to me, and my iPhone and my iPad I realize there are cameras on all of them. When I first got a laptop with a camera, my neice would Skype me and show me all around the house. The picture was blurry, the audio intermittent, but it was getting closer to the Jetsons video phone.
Last year network marketing behemoth ACN, introduced a video phone for all of it’s reps and members. Honestly it didn’t make sense. I have one with my MacBook already don’t I?
The next phase is about to boom, and this may be the one that works. Video Conference systems used to run upwards of $50,000 when I owned a tech company that installed them. Honestly we didn’t like installing them because they just weren’t profitable enough. It was what we did to keep the job.
Today there are a couple of really good solutions for cameras that just sit on your tv in the living room. For under $3000, you can have better quality video calls than we could deliver 10 years ago for $50,000. The increase in bandwidth has been a big factor. Simply put, more speed is a better picture and cleaner sound.
Facetime on the iApple stuff is cool and I think it still requires WiFi. I don’t know and honestly don’t care because Skype works fine on all of my devices and I don’t care what they have at the other end. I’ll keep using skype as long as it costs me less than $3 a month.
I pay the $3 so I can have a phone number and communicate with the rest of the world that hasn’t caught up. In the next three years video calling is expected to grow nearly 10 times its current usage. That is why the carriers, like AT&T and Verizon are scrambling to collect spectrum. Spectrum = Bandwidth, Bandwith = Happy customers.
Who ever thought the connection would be the important thing.
There are nearly a dozen different video calling tools, and as of now they all use the same algorithm, but don’t let the databases communicate. When you can use Facetime to call a google user and conference in an AOL user and a Skype user. Then it will be big.
Chat on the big screen anyone?