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Videophones Revisited
amitupadhyay7 writes "The NYTimes is running a story on Video Phones. ...more than 30 percent of American homes now have much faster 'pipes' coming into their homes: broadband Internet. Apple exploited this situation, for example, with its $140 iSight camera, a pocketcam that clips onto a Macintosh screen for free, high-quality Internet video calls. Now a company called Viseon has taken the next step by creating an actual video telephone called the VisiFone... in a related news Cisco is adding video to their IP phones. Telcos' response so far seems constructive."
Actually, this was predicted by Moore in the 1960's...it took them a long time to get it working.
There is something about actually seeing the person you are talking with.
When I lived in the Bayarea, and my parents were in Norway, videoconferencing made it much easier for my mother.
And video phones shouldn't be that hard to implement, would it? Just send a request over the line, to see if the receiver support some std protocol, and if not use voice only, otherwise, turn on camera if allowed...
Je ne parle pas francais.
I travel a lot and make sure to chat with my wife for a little while via iSight/iChat.
I find it that it helps reduce a lot of the anxiety of travel, for her/homesickness for me. Kind of strange, but 5 mins on camera can be more soothing that 1 hour on the phone.
And the quality of iSight is awesome. Unless there is rapid movement, the quality is comparable to TV.
My 2 cents.
The current big thing seems to be mobile video phones (mainly from 3, in the uk) which seem to have flopped big time. Has anyone actually found them useful at all? From what I've seen the quality of video is pretty useless.
Why is it that cisco is cramming this new feature onto IP phones - one that people don't really want?
clarifier: I install cisco IPT for a living so this is just my 2 cents from the field...
Customers complain about:
1) the platform running on Win2k (bugs/virus/stability)
2)lack of traditional PBX features (yeah, they're getting there, but not quite to what a G3 has)
3) lack of support for adavanced security on the wireless phones
4) lack of a true operator console
The list goes on. Not once has anyone said "These phones are crap - there's no video phone!" nope - that's not what keeps people from buying them.
So why address the one thing that people AREN'T clamoring for?
Dunno. I like IPT, I like cisco, I think the Cisco IPT platform is the best by far. But if Cisco wants to take market share away from traditional phones then they should focus on adding critical features that users want/expect.
I created this account just so I could comment on this story
Yep - the 'videophone' is an 'invention' that comes up and dies away with astounding regularity. I have a 1927 silent film about the future where a character makes a pay phone call on one. Tele-video actually had a lot of research in the 20's thru 40's and came to fruition with the common TV system in the early 50's (all the experience and research in WWII radar helped tremendously). The videophone was the future of Telephony in the 1964 worlds fair exhibit by ATT, and about every half generation since someone has had the same brilliant idea followed by the same lack of consumer excitement and demand.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
... and yet cell phones already have still photo cameras built in, and people seem to use them on a semi-regular basis.
It's more just a mere limit to current technology than anything else preventing the idea from spreading to a cell-phone.
If anything, having a video camera in the phone would encourage people to hold it out and away from their head and use earpiece/microphones, helping to lower all those EM waves crashing through their head.
I have been wondering what if people at Microsoft have this video phone function incorporated into Xbox. The subsidy for hardware, its ethernet port, powerful CPU and hard disk make this a viable add-on. If they really make it happen, then there will be Xbox webacams sitting on top of many TVs all over the world.
CT
I did a video chat with my mother and she could forget she was using a computer. She hates computers, but seeing my face put her at ease.
My friend did a conference with his daughter on her second birthday while he had to be out of the country. The phone alone would have provided a much-diminished experience for the two of them.
I regularly video chat with friends and family back in the states, where regular phone calls are expensive. iChat and iSight provide a better experience than a normal telephone plus the added benefit of a clear picture fullscreen on a 17 inch monitor.
I work with people whose English is not great and my Japanese is not great, so having another dimension to a conversation can save a great deal of time and prevent misunderstandings.
Apple's combination is so far ahead of what everyone else is doing it's hard to conveigh the difference to anyone who has only experienced video chat over netmeeting with a quickcam.
I read a story that this is finally good enough for deaf people to use for sign language.
What may be a gimmicky toy for you and a waste of bandwidth may be a necessity for someone else.
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.