A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the eComm Europe conference, billed as "What's Next in Telecom, Mobile and
Internet Communications." eComm is a relatively new event, with a refreshingly
different format: just a single conference track, where every speaker gets just
15 minutes - and when the gong goes for the end of your slot ... you just have
to sit down. The agenda was extraordinarily wide ranging, jumping dizzyingly
from voice over LTE to new business models, from the latest in video codecs to
voice-enabling Twitter (why?), and there was a lot of creative thinking on
display.
Skype was one of the
headline sponsors of the event, and their Chief Evangelist, Sten Tamkivi, gave a
very interesting talk on the factors that have made Skype successful. I've
always thought of Skype as just another low-cost Internet telephony play,
appealing mainly to those who want to make very cheap international calls.
That's certainly a big part of their business. But one statistic that Tamkivi
threw out nearly made me fall off my chair: he said that 33% of all Skype calls
use video.
Skype says that
video calling serves a different social purpose than voice calling. They ask
the rhetorical question "how long does a typical voice call last with a four
year old?" and then point out that a video call with a four year old might last
ten times as long. "Video encourages a form of rich and intimate communication
that just isn't possible with voice alone". The great majority of video calling
minutes that Skype is carrying is not substituting for regular voice minutes,
it's additional traffic that wouldn't have been generated in a pure voice
world.
The conventional wisdom about consumer video
telephony is that no one really wants it. There have been plenty of trials over
the years, with picture quality steadily getting better as video codecs have
improved, but the trials have consistently indicated a very low level of
interest in a standard video telephony service. The main objection seems to be
that people don't want to have to make themselves presentable before they pick
up the phone. That's always seemed
reasonable to me.
So here's my
take on this. If you give someone a videophone and ask them to use it
instead of a regular phone, they are going to assume that they will be on video
whenever they call someone else with a videophone. Sure, they can turn off the
camera - but what does this tell the person they are calling? There's a rat's
nest of interpersonal psychology here that just can't be
ignored.
But if the
videophone is a different device with a different service that operates in a
parallel universe to your regular phone service, those kinds of issues go away.
You use the regular phone to make a regular phone call, and you use the
videophone to make a video call. There's a different kind of etiquette for
each, so the risk of embarrassment is greatly reduced. We need to think of
video telephony as another distinct interpersonal communications channel which
has its own specific uses and conventions, just like SMS, IM, email and social
networking sites, rather than as an enhancement to voice
telephony.
It seems that video
telephony has finally taken its place as a mainstream consumer service alongside
voice telephony. And it took an Internet applications player, not a telco, to
make this happen.
