Video Conferencing is Growing – Just not in the Traditional Sense

Video conferencing is growing and it is doing so in the enterprise market – just not in the way it is measured today.

David Byrd wrote earlier this month about “growth” in telepresence and video conferencing:

According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment market declined 8.6% year over year in fourth quarter of 2012. The full year total for 2011 was $2.71 billion versus $2.64 billion in 2012. The decline was attributed to global macroeconomics rather than businesses souring on the need for video solutions. In fact, good growth was seen in room based video conferencing (4.1%) and personal videoconferencing (5.0%). The segment demonstrating a continued decline was the high-end or multi-codec immersive telepresence segment, which declined 32.8%.

So there’s a decline. It is in telepresence (which I rather hate), but room systems and “personal” ones saw “good” growth.

Bollocks.

Yes. There’s a demand.

Yes. Video conferencing is still needed.

But how many more room systems and “personal” systems do you need when you can get a bring-your-own solution for free? Be it Skype, Google Hangout, Tango, FaceTime, Twelephone, Bistri or any other.

There are more hourly video minutes on Skype than there are video conferencing systems of the type described above worldwide. Probably there are more ongoing Skype video calls at this moment than there are video conferencing systems out there…

Video conferencing is the high end of the market, but the low end is getting to a point that it should be analyzed and somehow added to the figures, otherwise, we will start losing interest.

I had a video call of the good-old type a few weeks ago – one that used Scopia Desktop, a product I’ve had the pleasure to use at RADVISION for many years. And yes, the video quality is better than most anything else I tried in the last couple of months (except for that telepresence call I attended). But you know what? It didn’t make a difference. I can live with the difference in quality quite easily and I am sure almost anyone else can as well.

And Skype is definitely growing. So are the other companies I’ve listed. Each one of them probably sees more video calls than any video conferencing deployment out there.

IDC – you are searching in the wrong place

Video conferencing companies – you need to find a way to bring something unique to the market. Better video quality doesn’t cut it anymore. Those WebRTC startups? They will end up eating your lunch sooner or later. And there are more than a 100 of them already.