Will Personal Video Actually Help Room Systems Grow?Will Personal Video Actually Help Room Systems Grow?

Will there just be more video everywhere?

Room videoconferencing isn't a particularly hot technology any more. There are lots of technology advances, ever-improving systems, and new developments around cloud-hosted services for room video. But fundamentally a room is a room is a room. And the more elaborate "immersive telepresence" systems are yesterday's news.

Personal video, on the other hand, is where the action is--not surprisingly, since personal devices are where the action is. Tablets and smartphones are the user devices of choice, and they're constantly evolving and improving, and users want to do video on these devices. And folks still tied to a PC/laptop are using services like Skype to do free video calling around the world, for business and personal lives. So all in all, personal video is a hot area.

And it's not just on the device side. Industry analyst Russell Bennett this week posted an item on No Jitter about the approval of a UC Interoperability Forum specification for implementations of H.264, the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard. SVC promises better performance on individual endpoints running video over diverse networks that have varying levels of quality. Russell calls this the next step in making video "the new voice;" I'm not sure I'd go that far, because I'm not sure video's ever going to be the new voice, but it is at least a step toward making video almost as easy as voice.

But I also heard from Andrew Davis this week, who shared an interesting statistic with me. Andrew is fielding Wainhouse Research's annual survey of video conferencing and UC end users (and if this describes you, it would definitely be helpful for you to participate by going here). He asked last year, and will ask again this year, how respondents believe increased deployment of personal video solutions will affect room system deployments. Here's the response he got last year:

* Our need for conference rooms will grow: 27%
* Our need for conference rooms will decline: 19%
* Our need for conference rooms will stay the same: 35%
* Don't Know: 19%

That sounds like enterprise end users believe that usage of personal video will drive usage of room video as well--which intuitively makes sense. It's just more video everywhere: People on the road or working from home or a remote office will video in, and the team that works in the main regional office will get together in the conference room for a big group video. That's how it's supposed to work, and it's how most of the video vendors are pitching their products, highlighting their ability to display a variety of participant endpoint types.

Whether this will play out in the real world remains to be seen. When you look at audio conferencing, there seems to be an increasing tendency to call into the bridge from your desk, even if half the people on the call are sitting in cubicles within a stone's throw of one another. That may be because of personal preferences, or because conference room availability may be at a premium. If that's the case for plain old conference rooms now, how much more might it be the case when you need a room that's specifically equipped with video?

On the other hand, with most offices going to open floor plans, there's also got to be a limit to how many desktop video conferences can be going on simultaneously in a confined space. Even with headsets, the cacophony of voices could impinge on the multitude of video conferences going on in a relatively confined space, to the detriment of everyone's audio and video experience.

So it'll be an interesting issue to watch going forward. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of Wainhouse's annual survey--it's one that we mine for insights frequently throughout the year. So the more responses they get, the better will be the data we can glean. So please, if you're an end user, take a few minutes for a quick 20-question survey by going here.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out that this and other video topics will be covered in lavish detail by Andrew Davis, his colleagues at Wainhouse, and the leaders in the video industry, at Enterprise Connect Orlando 2013 next month. We're very fortunate to have Andrew spearheading our Video track at EC; Wainhouse is the recognized leader among analyst firms in the video industry. So if this is an important issue to you, you should definitely consider joining us in Orlando, meeting Andrew, and hearing all that he and his panelists have to say on these critical issues.

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