Maybe I am dating myself a little bit, but even young people these days have heard of the Jetsons. When I was growing up the Jetsons were a popular cartoon on Saturday mornings and the concepts of flying cars, pushing buttons for a living and video telephones were introduced to a generation. Certainly some of the ideas used in the cartoon may never come to pass and others already have to a degree. But the one idea I think many people thought would have taken off by now is the video telephone. Video conferencing has been around for a while and many people thought every business would have a video conference room at one point. Then the concept of video conferencing was brought to the desktop and people again thought this it it, everyone will be doing it. Well, as conference calls and web conferencing have continued to grow, video conferencing has not.
There are plenty of theories on why video conferencing has not grown much in the past ten years. I think that several factors contribute to it, but I think mainly as a stand alone technology it is simply not as practical for businesses as web conferencing. Just being able to see someone at distance while you talk to them is not adding much to the equation. But now with web conferencing you can have integrated video within the web conferencing tool itself. This marriage of steak and sizzle puts web conferencing in a position where you can have the added comfort of being able to see the presenter and focus on the materials in a presentation.
In our web conferencing service is an integrated desktop video conferencing tool that is simple to use and provides the ability to see multiple parties as part of your conference call. If you have a laptop with a camera integrated into the system or have added a camera to your laptop or desktop, you can now share your live image with the participants on your web conference by simply clicking a button. As presenter on the conference call you can decide if the participants can also share their images with the other participants during the web conferencing. A scroll bar allows you to look across multiple video feeds at once and have some control over the picture as well.
As an integrated part of a web conference, video helps connect you with your audience and yet keeps the focus where it should be, on the materials.