Video Conferencing Gets Cloudy, Mobile and Personal

By Tara Seals
TMCnet Contributor

The rise of hosted video conferencing is tied to ease of use and reducing the cost of deployment—and as a consequence, demand for on-premises video conferencing systems is declining. In fact, just 44 percent of respondents to a recent survey reported a willingness to own an in-house video conferencing system, compared to 49 percent in 2013, and 70 percent in 2012.

TrueConf’s annual video conferencing market research, conducted at the Video+Conference 2014 conference, quizzed IT specialists, CEOs and leaders within IT departments, enterprises and organizations across the Russian Federation. According to the survey, non-room-based video use has certainly crossed the chasm: a full 60 percent of respondents said that they hold videoconferences on their PCs, and popularity of mobile video conferencing has doubled since 2013: more than 10 percent of respondents use video conferencing on their mobile endpoints.

And, about 10 percent of respondents already use a cloud service, while 19 percent use both types of video conferencing solutions.

“User requirements are changing: they want to always stay in touch, to choose devices themselves, to get high- quality video and audio and at the same time not pay too much,” said Michael Gotalsky, TrueConf CEO.

Video conferencing has also moved beyond the meeting room: 60 percent of the respondents hold video conferences and make video calls at their workspace, 51 percent use meeting rooms, and only around 7 percent of those surveyed rent a hall with a video conferencing system. The study in tandem showed that 49 percent of users are willing to manage the video session themselves; only 40 percent of them are willing to let a video conferencing administrator manage the session.

The results of the survey also show that users based in smaller, remote towns prefer flexible and affordable video conferencing solutions based on scalable video coding (SVC) architecture, which replaces the traditional MCU approach with denser, more compressed streams to support more participants simultaneously.

The overwhelming majority of respondents — nearly 80 percent, would like to be able to see up to 10 participants on the video conference screen at a time, but only 14 percent would like to see more than 15 participants.

A full 37 percent of remotely surveyed participants use solutions based on the on-premises software with an SVC-enabled server, while 29 percent use solutions based on the MCU hardware mixer. With in-person survey respondents, it was the reverse situation — 41 percent of them use video solutions based on the MCU hardware mixer, 20 percent use cloud-based solutions without SVC, and only 12 percent use video conferencing solutions based on the on-premises software SVC-enabled servers.

“The findings of our research confirm the worldwide movement away from video conferencing towards unified communications systems: from MCU architecture towards SVC, from meeting rooms to PCs and mobile devices,” Gotalsky said.