My daughter moved from London to New York a few months ago. We started video Skype-ing several times daily. Back in London, we saw every twist of her new life as it developed on screen. If she was a bit low, we saw it rather than relying on her to tell us. When her furniture arrived, we gave our views on where she might place it.
When Hurricane Irene threatened, we looked out of her windows to see the trees waving in the wind. We often joked that we saw more of her now she had moved 3,000 miles away than when she lived on the other side of London. I am writing this while flying back from our first visit to see her and I have to say that all those hours of video calling now seem surprisingly unfulfilling, giving us only a superficial sniff of how life really was for her.
Nearly 50 years ago, when AT&T introduced the world's first video phone and it flopped to the tune of $1bn, an executive at the company commented ruefully that, contrary to their and customer expectations, video added little to phone calls, and paradoxically, removed a great deal of the intimacy of a voice-only call.
I now understand how that curious removal of intimacy with video can work. When we video-ed with my daughter, I, as a geeky male, would spend most of the call marvelling at the technology and the novelty, while she and my wife would repeatedly complain about the technical inadequacies — the audio dropouts, the video freezes and the sudden disconnections that seem to be inherent in video calling.
Even though it was one of the joys of technology promised for decades by SciFi films, video calling has repeatedly failed to wow the public, even when it's a totally free add-on to utilities such as Skype. In 2003, new 3 phone company launches majored on video mobile calling. I only once saw anyone use the service, at 2am in a bar in Italy. A young man's 3 phone trilled. Before picking up, he checked his hair in a wall mirror. Hong Kong-based 3 was convinced that the advance of video calling would be spearheaded by the garrulous and widespread Chinese diaspora. It didn't happen. Lack of enthusiasm for video calling seems to be cross-cultural.
The drawbacks have always seemed to outweigh the modest benefit, the idea that somehow video would be the difference between hearing what people say and seeing what they mean. But we geeks continue to believe video calling really will become commonplace somehow, sometime, soon-ish.
When Apple launched its FaceTime video chat service last year (which is more stable, sharp and widescreen than Skype), delegates at a developer conference were shown a video of a soldier in Afghanistan using FaceTime on his iPhone 4 to watch his wife having a scan in the States, and then two deaf friends chatting in sign language using FaceTime. The assembled techies were reportedly teary-eyed and applauding wildly.
With FaceTime, however, Apple doesn't seem to have changed the world's behaviour as one might have expected it to, given its track record of popularising existing but previously unwanted technology such as the portable digital music player and the tablet computer. Yet other technology companies are now piling resources into video communication, fixated, so it seems, on the proposition that the YouTube generation will demand video in its daily personal and business calls.
Microsoft earlier this year bought Skype, complete with its 663 million users, for $8.5bn, presumably with some kind of plan to monetise the service; while some 1 per cent of Skype subscribers pay for calls to non-Skype numbers, its video calls are free. Google, in its seeming rush to do and buy everything, has also introduced a less well-known video communication feature, Google Chat.
Analyst Forrester believes that video calling has reached critical mass and, it says, "nearly half of information workers will have some type of personal video solution in 2016, up from just 15 per cent today."
Will it really happen, as a business and social staple, and not a gimmick? Maybe, but it is hard to think of a technology that has been as consistently unwanted over such a long period as video calling.
Follow Jonathan Margolis at twitter.com/SimplyBestTech
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