April 29, 2016

Video Conferencing Problem

In this blog, I will address the elephant in the room regarding video conferencing. It is, at least in my opinion today, the biggest hurdle in mass adoption. The problem? Making a call. It's not price, the technology, the debate of hardware vs software or anything else. Making a call is the worst and most difficult part of video conferencing.
In what turned out to be a sad thing after the fact, I was elated that a difficult call was made after the 5th try today. This was a simple (haha) intercompany Cisco codec to Polycom codec call. We tried my VMR, their VMR, their IP address, another VMR and finally yet another VMR connected the call.

If my car started once in every five attempts, I would find another means of travel or at the very least I would get consistently pissed off and think that my car needed fixed.

If my refrigerator kept food cool for only four hours a day, it would be deemed faulty.

If four out of every five beers I opened was skunky...oh Lord help us.

Yet not being able to make a call is a constant fact of life with video conferencing. Until calling and, to a lesser extent, scheduling gets streamlined greatly across varying vendor product lines, video conferencing will remain niche and not widely adopted. The benefits are great, but to achieve those benefits you're forced to go through to a lot of crap to get there.




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