Featured Article from Conferencing

What's Driving Change in Videoconferencing?

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Videoconferencing is undergoing a lot of change lately.

Smartphones, Snapchat, and YouTube (News - Alert) have made many people, particularly younger generations, extremely comfortable with using video to communicate.

There’s a push in the business world to leverage video and other communications mediums and tools to encourage collaboration. And huddle rooms and other collaborative spaces are becoming a regular part of the picture.

And the rise of the cloud and mobile apps have made videoconferencing more widely available to people at all levels.

“We saw a drastic increase in the implementation of visual communication technologies particularly in a huddle space format and a move by businesses to embrace cloud-based videoconferencing and collaboration technologies, enabling staff to work remotely,” says Marius van Wyk of SkyGroup Communications, commenting on trends of the recent past.

"When there is growth in one area (cloud), there is generally a decline in another. We are seeing an acceleration in the pace at which the demand for on-premises video infrastructure is declining, as business opts for the cost efficiencies and scalability offered by the cloud,” adds Van Wyk of SkyGroup, a South Africa distributor of Barco, ClearOne, Lifesize, Pexip, Yamaha, and Yealink (News - Alert) solutions.

As David Kung of Oblong Industries notes in an upcoming INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine feature “huddle rooms typically host up to six collaborators at a time. They use these spaces to escape noise and distraction, or to connect to collaborators in other offices and remote locations via conferencing technology. Analysts at Wainhouse (News - Alert) and at Gartner both estimate an excess of 45 million small to medium meeting spaces globally.”

Team collaboration was the top 2018 communications-related priority sited by respondents to a recent Vyopta survey. Videoconferencing came in second. The survey gathered input from 336 respondents across a variety of industry verticals.

Transparency Market Research expects the global videoconferencing market to be worth $8,958.7 million by 2025, expanding at a 8.3 percent CAGR between 2017 and 2025.