Video conference solutions have evolved tremendously in the last decade. What used to once be ridden with unreliable connections, poor video quality, lack of synchronized viewing has come a long way. Video conferencing is now being increasingly leveraged not just for casual video chats, but also for professional uses, including the more formal presentations and meetings – thanks to the fine tuning and improvisation of conferencing features and fixing of issues reported. Organizations are increasingly relying on such video conference solutions to improve productivity, promote better team bonding amongst global team members, and bring down operational costs.
With so much inherent advantage have we already reached the full potential when it comes to video conferencing or are there things to continue to focus on? Even for a technology which is extremely mature, there is always scope for improvement and video conferencing is no exception. For example, right now multi user video conferencing is either not available or very raw in its rendering. Even leading solutions such as Skype don’t offer multi user video conferencing as yet. Similarly, the audio, video sync is still not a perfect solution and has scope for improvement. When closed captioning is added, synchronization is further an issue.
Video conferencing still consumes quite a bit of internet bandwidth and is unable to render when signals are not strong. With global consumption of video solutions, it is important that product companies continue to look for optimization strategies to improve solution performance even in low bandwidth scenarios. The number of players that are attempting to solve issues in the video conference space today are huge – this includes the more traditional large players as well as new and small players alike. However, issues around prohibitive costs, customized feature setups, need for complicated setup often plague most of these solutions.
Slowly organizations are moving into hosting video solutions on the cloud, but this space again has scope for improvement and seasoned use. In all, this industry as a whole is heading in the right direction but, there is certainly ample room for improvement – we have definitely not reaped the full potential.