Video Conferencing – a Consultants Perspective
Video conferencing has been tipped for the top for some time now, and finally its day has arrived. Here, Mike Entwistle, Managing Director for CCOMM Ltd, who started in the conferencing consulting space explains how the combination of the burgeoning ‘green’ movement, improved technologies, lower prices and a new generation that is ready and able to embrace video means that video conferencing will be the ubiquitous tool for communication in the 21st Century.
40 years ago the first video call took place, when AT&T introduced the Picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair in America. Viewed as a fascinating curiosity at the time, it never actually became popular and was too expensive to be practical for most consumers. At its peak, the Picturephone service had only 500 subscribers, and the service faded away by the mid 1970’s.
Now, nearly four decades later, videoconferencing has come of age, with manufacturers such as Polycom, Tandberg and Life Size routinely selling tens of thousands of units a year worldwide. It’s a growing market. In 2005 video conferencing was worth about .15 billion globally, according to Frost & Sullivan. Now the market is expected to reach .1 billion by 2010, growing at a compound annual rate of 22.1 per cent. Another research firm Gartner is even more bullish, projecting the video conferencing industry to be worth .8 billion by 2011.
