Before the age of the smartphone, the only feasible way to talk to someone via video conference was through large, expensive telecommunication setups that would require an entire room set aside for its sole use. But with the ubiquity of smartphones now, just about anyone can call up a friend or colleague using video conferencing software like Skype or Blue Jeans Mobile. While calling someone up for a video conference has become as easy as pressing a touchscreen button, what else has changed in the world of video conferencing?
File Sharing
Video conferencing as a whole has drastically improved across all levels, and one of those improvements is the capability to instantly share files and documents amongst the participants. Besides the benefit of being able to see the faces of each participant, video conference providers like Bluejeans offer a wonderful feature of sharing documents amongst the different parties. Have an important spreadsheet that everyone needs to see? The video conference itself provides the tools needed to show everyone the data without needing to use email or other third-party routes. Corporate Decisions lauds file sharing and sharing screens as an absolute necessity when it comes to video conferencing. Being able to show a PowerPoint presentation through a single button click makes life much easier and more efficient.
Multi-platform
While video conferencing on a mobile device has become one of the greatest tools to businesses around the world, it would be more of a hindrance if not for one critical facet, that video conferencing software has become cross-platform capable. According to Android Guys, in the past, you needed special hardware and software in order to use video conferencing. But now, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a smartphone, a tablet, or a full personal computer, everyone can still talk even if they’re all on different devices. This interoperability has allowed video conferencing to become a leading business tool around the world. It has added a practicality and efficiency previously unheard of.
Recording and Archiving
Even with the huge reach technology has, there will always be times when someone is unable to make it to a critical meeting. Whatever the reason is, it’s detrimental to the person missing the meeting and the people who do attend. However, modern video conferencing technology has created a fix to this problem in the capability to record and archive entire meetings for later review. According to Home Toys, the ability to record and archive video conferences has provided HR departments a unique tool when dealing with interviews and new hires. Instead of the employer sticking around to evaluate an interviewee, they can continue working on whatever important business they have while the HR representative conducts the interview. After the recorded interview is saved, the employer can review it at their leisure and evaluate the interviewee when they have time.
Video Quality and Compression
If you were to ask any Internet user what the most important aspect of online video is, you can bet that a good chunk would say the quality of the picture is most important. High quality images and the Internet have had a long history. In the days of dial-up, high quality video was extremely difficult to deal with because of how much bandwidth was needed to handle so much data. Obviously, Internet connections have drastically improved along with every other aspect of video conferencing. High quality video is still of paramount importance, but thankfully the infrastructure can handle the data streams much more smoothly now.
According to the Electronics section of How Stuff Works, video conferencing has always required a great deal of data and bandwidth. Designers and software engineers are constantly looking for ways to keep the quality the same while reducing the amount of data that transfers across the web. Reducing data while retaining quality can be done through compressing the images. In the past, compressing video was done via block-based compression, where the entire screen was split into blocks, or pixels, and constantly measured as frames came and went. A more modern approach that was developed is called Object-based compression. In this method, the software recognizes stationary objects and moving objects as separate and focuses more resources on the moving objects while mostly ignoring the stationary objects. This method is much more efficient and provides a higher quality video with less data usage.
Video conferencing has come a long way from its origins and it will continue to advance as time goes by. The technology is at a point where it can be used almost anywhere but it still has a ways to go before it reaches a full saturation point. The features available with video conferencing now are far beyond anything available in the past, and the future definitely holds even more fascinating features just waiting to be developed.
Featured image credit: Phone Video Conferencing/ShutterStock
