They’ve been talking about videophones for as long as telephones have existed.
Just two years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, French futurists conceived of the “telephonoscope” that allowed two-way communications with a video feed.
Interestingly, this was 10 years before the motion picture camera was even invented.
Nearly 50 years later, they became a reality with the German Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen (loosely translated as the “visual-remote intercom”). The system was placed in post offices in Berlin and Leipzig and allowed people to video chat over that hundred-mile span.
Since that time in the late 1930s, there have been hundreds of attempts at making videophones mainstream. They never seem to stick.
Some say it’s because it’s a bit too intrusive. Some say it’s because the quality is too low. Still others say it’s because there’s no way to effectively make eye contact (either you’re looking into a camera lens or at a screen).
Whatever the reason, two-way video communication has been relegated to niche status. It’s useful for boardroom chats, in telemedicine, and in absentee family visits.
In the last decade, YouTube spearheaded video blogging, and other now-defunct services like Justin.tv and Stickam popularized streaming video chats. More recently, Vine popularized the six-second video clip as a form of asynchronous communication.
In the last few weeks, there have been numerous developments in video streaming that cover both the live aspect and the asynchronous aspect. They highlight the fact that video communication is still finding its place in our world.
Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and Social Video
Vine is the Twitter of video. With heavy time and quality constraints, users learned to creatively work with what they were given.
The effect has been brilliant, and the format quickly yielded new stars and a new language in video editing. It became so popular that Facebook‘s (NASDAQ: FB) photo-sharing social network Instagram soon followed suit and let users post short videos similar to Vine.
On the other side of things, Google’s social network Google+ has long been built around its “hangouts” feature, which lets large groups of users convene in live video chatrooms. Their live video feeds are enhanced by the ability to share screens, to post text and graphics, and to host non-video participants. It’s proven to be an incredibly popular feature on a social network that has otherwise been unpopular among the masses.
Twitter, with its 288 million active users, had no video element to its service. That is, until recently.
In late February, a video streaming app called Meerkat from tiny San Francisco start-up Life On Air launched to great fanfare. The application allowed users to open live video streams with their Twitter identities and share them on the social network. The idea was that it took the functionality of LiveStream or Ustream and wove it seamlessly into Twitter.
The app was massively popular for two weeks, and then Twitter dropped a bomb: The social media company announced it had acquired live streaming app Periscope for a reported $100 million. Soon, the app was live, and Twitter had its own live video capability.
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Journalist Jack Smith IV began doing frequent streams on Periscope, and though he says the medium earned him a strange miniature form of celebrity, he concluded that the app is “terrible… slow, glitchy.”
Right now, everyone has rushed into the proverbial nightclub, but if the music is terrible, the lights are bright and no one is dancing, everyone is going to leave en masse… It’s impossible to say whether the problems with Periscope ensure its demise. The nightclub hasn’t emptied yet, but if there isn’t an easier way to find good Periscopes and share them, that day will come soon.
Meerkat, likewise, has been plagued with problems. PC Magazine’s respected smartphone guru Sascha Segan called it “Dumb and Doomed… a parasite on Twitter.”
“Asynchronicity is the order of the day. Even Snapchat is asynchronous. That’s how you get 16 million Vine views on your pratfall video: by making your content available on the viewer’s schedule, not yours,” he said.
Like one-to-one video calling, live streaming video seems destined for niche use. It has existed for nearly as long as webcams have existed. It requires either scheduling or utter spontaneity for streams to pick up viewers, and engagement on a one-to-many scale requires a certain type of expertise.
In a broader sense, when video functionality is added to an existent platform, it doesn’t appreciably increase its value.
However, streaming video requires expensive bandwidth, and that’s the resource to put your money behind.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
