The last year has brought video conferencing to a peak that nobody would have contemplated seriously in 2019. Yet even this technology isn’t new.
Post Office Telecommunications as BT was known at that stage, introduced Confravision in 1971. A brochure that appears to be dated 1975 explained that the system was available through purpose-built studios which were ‘designed to cater for 5 conferees to be seated at the conference table’. The system provided two-way sound and vision and ‘enabled the Confravision call to be completely controlled by the user without any assistance from Post Office personnel’.
One of the drawbacks was that studios were located only in Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, London and Manchester, at least in the early days. Part of the problem was the cost of the equipment needed for the system and the other was the challenge of providing sufficient bandwidth between centres to carry a video signal.
However, video cameras were developing at a rapid rate and during the 1980s one company demonstrated a camera so small that it could be hidden in the header board of their stand at the M&IT show in London.
By the mid-1980s there were suggestions that video conferencing would become increasingly important but the 1990s brought significant technological developments that made the tech more readily available. I wrote some publicity material for a company called GPT in 1995 for the launch of an upgrade to their video conferencing kit which was designed to be used with PCs.
It was probably around this time that some commentators started claiming that video conferencing would sound the death-knell of live conferences. It’s a message that has been repeated at regular intervals ever since.
In reality, conference calling was more likely to be sound only with participants in a meeting all calling in to a telephone conferencing service from individual locations and being able to hear each other over the phone line. By this time board rooms often had a gadget in the middle of the table that contained speakers and microphones so that people sitting round the table could have a discussion with individuals or other groups in other parts of the world.
Video conferencing technology advanced significantly as broadband spread and by the early 2000s reports began to appear claiming that it was being used with increasing frequency in the medical field.
The introduction of Skype along with the provision of a video camera as standard in laptops started to move video conferencing into the mainstream. By the middle of the noughties high definition systems were available but while the capabilities of video conferencing continued to improve, the tech was still not having the overall effect that had been predicted.
Then Covid struck in early 2020 and suddenly remote working became a necessity for many and meetings using Zoom and Microsoft Teams became commonplace.
There have been suggestions that video conferencing will continue to to be used at the same level even after Covid has been brought under control but I doubt it. Once unrestricted movement is permitted, I suspect that the frequency of these meetings will decline. They will still be far more common than they were in 2019 but psychologists have suggested that there are advantages to being in the same room as the people with whom you need to discuss something. Those ideas seem to be borne out by comments from participants who are expressing dissatisfaction with remote conferencing. That isn’t to say that the day of the video conference is done – far from it, but it’s still not going to be an automatic replacement for face-to-face meetings.
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