While most of the recent IMTC Forum meeting focused on traditional video telephony, two presentations had a broader outlook. On the first day, Christine Perey's look at Emerging Mobile Visual Communications Applications suggested that, increasingly, video telephony will be combined with video content, both professional and personal (see-what-I-see, video blogs, etc.). She also posited that the eventual convergence of the Internet with mobile data will be a train wreck for 3G mobile operators. Finally, she suggested that the only way we'd find the killer app for visual communications was to enable the hundreds of thousands of experiments that are possible with the Internet model. Way to go Christine! Thank you.
On the final day, I presented my view of what it will take to make a truly disruptive real time video application -- an application that might actually be used by a significant number of people (as opposed to video telephony that seems to interest less than 1% of users).
First, we have to look beyond face-to-face video telephony. It's already apparent, from observing mobile video telephony users in Japan, that a more popular application is "See-what-I-see" where the mobile user points their camera at something interesting and shows it off to the folks at the other end -- "Look Mom, I'm climbing Mt Fuji" or, from the job site, "Tanaka-san, look at the quality of this weld." Note that "see-what-I-see" uses full-duplex voice, but usually only requires half-duplex video.
In audio communications, Skype is a disruptive influence. Besides being free and being the first VoIP application that "just works," Skype adds presence and wideband audio. Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom has said that Skype will be adding video this summer. But if they only add face-to-face video telephony, that's not compelling. Even when Skype-enabled mobile video handsets emerge, that only adds "see-what-I-see." Users with 3G mobile video handsets access video content more frequently than they use video telephony.
However, as Andrew Odlyzko demonstrated, professionally prepared content is not king, when compared to people's interest in person-to-person communications. Furthermore, when you consider content of all descriptions, it's the unusual, frequently personal, items out on the long tail where the biggest value lies. Also users create vastly more visual content than they do audio content. (There are less than 100K garage bands in the US, but more than 100M cameras). Already, Nokia has launched Lifeblog and Google has launched Google Video Hosting -- both plarforms that host user created content.
The disruptive application for visual communications is likely to support the exchange of content at multiple time scales -- from real time (face-to-face, see-what-I-see, webcams), to near real time (video messaging, video email, MMS, video blogs), to accessing and sharing stored content, whether professionally prepared or user created.
Will we see this really disruptive video application anytime soon? Probably not in the next 12 months.
However, over the next 12-24 months, Skype-enabled mobile handsets that work over WiFi will be available. And with Skype there are developer APIs, enabling anyone to try out new applications w/o waiting for cooperation from mobile carriers. That's one path to the Internet development model that Christine promoted, likely there will be others. So over the next 2-4 years, we can anticipate numerous new visual communications applications. Many will fail, but...
I look forward to a really disruptive visual communications application emerging in less than four years!
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