The Consumerization of Video Conferencing

I've got another item to share with you from the LifeSize Tech Day I attended a couple of weeks back. I was part of a group of "influencers" invited to attend, as was Andy McCaskey, who writes for SDR News. We hadn't met before, but being a small group, we all got to know each other during the event.

One of Andy's post-event follow-ups was for us to do a video interview. Basically, he wanted to get my take on where video conferencing is going and how it fits into the Unified Communications value proposition. From there, we talked about the LifeSize event and where we see them going in this market.

We did the interview late last week, and it's posted now on the SDR News portal. It runs about 14 minutes, and if you get a chance to watch it, I encourage you to look at the other content there afterwards. I know Andy has interviews coming with other attendees from the LifeSize event, but they're not posted yet.

Just a quick caveat on the segment he did with me. I didn't know this was being done as a formal interview for broadcast, so the quality is far from optimal. Had I known, the video setup would have been much different and easier on the eyes. Well, it's what we say that really matters, right? And, hey, this is a simple dose of realism - something that we don't talk about when trying to explain why we don't use video all the time.

Bottom line, video does not translate well for ad hoc communication, which happens to be the way that a lot of communication actually takes place. Am not sure we're ever going to fix that, and since I'm not auditioning for a job at ESPN - that would be so much fun! - I'll just leave it at that and hope you can see past what's on the screen.