I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from moving on to something better.
The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.
Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.
I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives.
Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.
There is a problem with asynchronous text-based communication that doesn't happen with synchronous voice-based communication: I often write (or feel the need to write) text like this:
> I'm not sure what you meant by "blargh". If you meant foo then [long explanation, probably with bullet points]. If you meant bar then [a different long explanation].
This isn't an efficient use of either of our time. Also, if the explanation was already a bit intimidating (in terms of amount of content) then double that is even worse, even if half of it is actually irrelevant.
The alternative is that I ask what they meant by "blargh" but often the response doesn't get the heart of the difference, probably because the difference is subtle enough they didn't realise there was one in the first place. So it takes a few messages to sort out, by which point the whole conversation has dragged on for a few extra hours precisely because the communication is asynchronous so messages aren't replied to instantly by either of us, which is distracting us (or me, at least!) for that long.
In a conversation where there's likely to be some ambiguities in what you're saying, it's just much faster and less wasteful to iterate your joint understanding with a synchronous conversation. I often have highly technical conversations that are like this, but it's probably true even of lots of non-technical conversations.
Of course what I've said is mostly true of one to one conversations. But depending on the nature of a meeting, often lots of these happen between pairs of people in the meeting.
> "The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable"
The Library of Congress has ~38 million books in it. Imagine you could search it, it's easy to say that would make it more useful. And it probably would for some people - but a human has very little processing power and slow reading speed, if you got 38 million books reduced to 1,000 context-free paragraphs, that's still too many to read through.
This leaves "search" as a tool for limited situations such as: You remember roughly who put the content there and when and close-enough exactly what it said. Often in this situation that's still not enough to find it. Or, you want something popular like "iTunes Store Login" or "$Restaurant opening times". Or you are a researcher/archeologist.
Outside those kinds of usecases, "it's searchable" is more of a tragedy of the commons style problem - people who are best placed to do it (those making decisions) don't want to do it, and offload the problem to everyone else saying "it's searchable". This leaves decisions, documentation, and history scattered over an ever-increasing wasteland and intermingled with countless book-equivalent-volumes of chat, jokes, memes, flamewars, "donuts in the breakroom" trivia, outdated status updates, and all sorts.
Slogging through 1,000 paragraphs from the Library of Congress search results is still possible. Increasingly, every move is dogged by the weight of "search the 10,000 GitHub issues and read all the screens and screens of backlog" and "search the mailing list archives", the Slack archives, the IRC archives, the email threads, the forum threads, skim-reading junk and junk and junk, only to have to do it again 5 minutes later when your boss says "what was the status of X project?" and 20 minutes later when your coworker says "any reason X was changed?" and 10 minutes later when you want to know if X library should be behaving this way or not.
"Do nothing and let the search be our panacea" has always won over "big-organize up front" but it should be clear to everyone by now that Google search results get worse year on year. Nature lets things rot, unless you put maintenance effort in to keep them. We burn some money and a LOT of people's time keeping junk by default, on the "it might come in useful oneday" principle that leads to hoarder houses.
We act as if data can't cause disease and can't attract cockroaches, but ignore the fact that it piles up, clutters things up, gets in the way, it's the arterial plaque, the drainpipe sludge, the rust, of computer systems.
The power of digital communication is space travel - it's possible for people far away to be involved, and time travel - people who weren't there see what happened. "Searchable" is the Siren's call, that's not its power, that's its road to Hell paved with good intentions.
Try a big screen at hi resolution and stereo. It changes the experience.
And by big, I mean 40+ inches and resolution of 1080p or greater.
If you’ve ever tried it, you’ll see how incredible videoconferencing can actually be. It’s as different of an experience as Wolfenstein 3D was from the previous 2D map version. Totally different.
You should look at Microsoft Teams & Streams. Yuo can record your video conference, it produces a reasonable automated transcript which is searchable, letting people easily jump to the relevant part of the meeting.
This is something I’ve been working on the side for over a decade. A big part of the hurdle is in technologies. Just not there in terms of achieving this in a usable format.
My company uses WebEx not Zoom, but I have found meetings far more tolerable since I started disabling inbound video. I've always turned off my own video, but turning off everyone else's has been a game changer. The important parts of a remote meeting are the audio and screenshare; video is a net-negative. I get no value from watching people type, fidget around with a phone, have random family members and pets walk by, etc. and actually find it quite distracting.
I find the opposite is true, meetings where I have video enabled are more focused and enjoyable to me (as an introvert too!). I think people pay more attention on video calls in general, and it seems like conversations flow better with fewer of those "you go... No you go!" type moments.
Overall it does require people to take work from home seriously though! Back in the days when we worked in offices video calls did have less pets and random people or kids walk in!
If people are able to have a dedicated office this works better but obviously not everyone was prepared for a forced work from home experience. It does require a solid internet connection which has been strained lately.
a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them
b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see
c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds
Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone.
It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1]
What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior.
Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around.
Because all the big players are trying to own the standard chat/call protocol, so instead we have several non-standard chat/call protocols, so consumers suffer. The market is failing to produce the product that consumers want. And I can't see this changing in the current world.
SIP is ubiquitous and works pretty well. It's probably at the core of all these video conferencing apps.
You can do audio/video calls and IM with it (using SIMPLE). The problem is being able to call people beyond your SIP servers. Companies don't want to allow it, probably because they don't want to have their service become a commodity.
I think Facebook is ultimately right, just too early, betting on VR being the next thing.
Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or awkward.
VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers" stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future.
For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets. Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.
If you want to play in hard mode, figure out how to get video calls working for someone calling their grandma in a nursing home, when she doesn't have a laptop or smartphone.
It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind.
I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working during the pandemic.
My 100yr old grandma is using KOMP right now, and that's going very well. She can understand us better than on the phone. The device is on the expensive side, though, with 600 £.
Google, Amazon, and Facebook all make devices that do exactly this. A big screen that sits on a side table, essentially a digital photo frame, that you can dial into. In the Amazon Echo case, you can even “Drop In” and connect with no need for grandma to even accept.
It exists, it's called a Facebook Portal. It's an outstanding piece of hardware and has been an absolute blessing for our elderly relatives in this pandemic. Of course, you are letting Facebook into your living room, which does give me the willies but not as many willies as the thought of our kids and their grandparents going 3 months without seeing each other.
IMO, Zoom has the worst user experience of all video conferencing tools by a long shot, at least on Linux, regardless of whether you are a paying user or not. And while Skype was doing a terrible job for years, these days it's light years ahead of Zoom. Google Meet is also doing an incredible job and lately I've been using it a lot. I seriously don't understand how a horrible product such as Zoom made it so big... So whatever comes after Zoom, I hope it will do a better job.
What on earth happened to Skype? Over a decade of head start, why wasn't it completely untouchable when COVID-19 came along?
Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.
I feel part of Zoom's initial foothold in the market was that inside of a conference room it "just worked". Or at least more so than other options I'd tried, especially a couple of years ago. Even earlier this year I had issues getting Google Meet to work in our office's conference rooms. Minimizing or removing the "fiddling with the AV software" phase of meetings is huge.
Very interesting post. One thing I'm thinking of is if an enterprise uses something like Slack then you could have persistent video rooms similar to the audio rooms in Discord.
The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now.
It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to see what the Snap of business comms could look like.
With my experience Microsoft Teams is actually a better choice than Zoom. You don't even need to install the program and it works on the web, unlike the fake "web interface" of Zoom that just loads infinitely and forces you to install their suspicious client.
I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat and it was an abysmal tire fire.
My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea.
My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing.
We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat.
My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing.
Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.
The thing that comes after Zoom is another app that makes the experience of teleconferencing easier.
If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio, Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an interesting product.
Certainly I can see Microsoft simply integrating video chat into the Office suite. I'm kind of shocked they haven't yet really solved real-time collaboration given that they own Skype and Office.
It's called Microsoft Teams, and in its current iteration, it's surprisingly good. I actually prefer it to Slack. It is highly integrated with Office 365 (supports live collaboration etc.).
The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance).
It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID)
It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai.
On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call.
EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.
What I think is interesting is how much worse the conversation experience is today vs. during the days of circuit-switched landline phones. There was no perceptible difference between a live conversation and one by phone between New York and Washington DC.
Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little "ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.
Virtual reality meetings? Ideally to truly replicate the in-person experience since I feel like the body language/phyiscal presense ocmponent is important.
The biggest opportunity in video was YouTube hence Google acquired it. Zoom is only for business users: institutions, companies etc. Personal users use WhatsApp, Skype, Viber or whatever they prefer.
"we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.
I believe integrated groupware is the future. No separate tools for chat, discussions, calls, screensharing, collaborative editing, email and filesharing.
For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.
Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I damn sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale."
Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply lost any further sales.
I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really wants.
[+] [-] Joeri|5 years ago|reply
The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.
Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.
[+] [-] zucker42|5 years ago|reply
Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
“We need to be async only yada yada. It’s how the Linux kernel is developed”
We do that until our projects are late or we have an outage, then it’s just endless synchronous calls until we get our smug on again.
Just have both in moderation.
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|5 years ago|reply
> I'm not sure what you meant by "blargh". If you meant foo then [long explanation, probably with bullet points]. If you meant bar then [a different long explanation].
This isn't an efficient use of either of our time. Also, if the explanation was already a bit intimidating (in terms of amount of content) then double that is even worse, even if half of it is actually irrelevant.
The alternative is that I ask what they meant by "blargh" but often the response doesn't get the heart of the difference, probably because the difference is subtle enough they didn't realise there was one in the first place. So it takes a few messages to sort out, by which point the whole conversation has dragged on for a few extra hours precisely because the communication is asynchronous so messages aren't replied to instantly by either of us, which is distracting us (or me, at least!) for that long.
In a conversation where there's likely to be some ambiguities in what you're saying, it's just much faster and less wasteful to iterate your joint understanding with a synchronous conversation. I often have highly technical conversations that are like this, but it's probably true even of lots of non-technical conversations.
Of course what I've said is mostly true of one to one conversations. But depending on the nature of a meeting, often lots of these happen between pairs of people in the meeting.
[+] [-] jodrellblank|5 years ago|reply
The Library of Congress has ~38 million books in it. Imagine you could search it, it's easy to say that would make it more useful. And it probably would for some people - but a human has very little processing power and slow reading speed, if you got 38 million books reduced to 1,000 context-free paragraphs, that's still too many to read through.
This leaves "search" as a tool for limited situations such as: You remember roughly who put the content there and when and close-enough exactly what it said. Often in this situation that's still not enough to find it. Or, you want something popular like "iTunes Store Login" or "$Restaurant opening times". Or you are a researcher/archeologist.
Outside those kinds of usecases, "it's searchable" is more of a tragedy of the commons style problem - people who are best placed to do it (those making decisions) don't want to do it, and offload the problem to everyone else saying "it's searchable". This leaves decisions, documentation, and history scattered over an ever-increasing wasteland and intermingled with countless book-equivalent-volumes of chat, jokes, memes, flamewars, "donuts in the breakroom" trivia, outdated status updates, and all sorts.
Slogging through 1,000 paragraphs from the Library of Congress search results is still possible. Increasingly, every move is dogged by the weight of "search the 10,000 GitHub issues and read all the screens and screens of backlog" and "search the mailing list archives", the Slack archives, the IRC archives, the email threads, the forum threads, skim-reading junk and junk and junk, only to have to do it again 5 minutes later when your boss says "what was the status of X project?" and 20 minutes later when your coworker says "any reason X was changed?" and 10 minutes later when you want to know if X library should be behaving this way or not.
"Do nothing and let the search be our panacea" has always won over "big-organize up front" but it should be clear to everyone by now that Google search results get worse year on year. Nature lets things rot, unless you put maintenance effort in to keep them. We burn some money and a LOT of people's time keeping junk by default, on the "it might come in useful oneday" principle that leads to hoarder houses.
We act as if data can't cause disease and can't attract cockroaches, but ignore the fact that it piles up, clutters things up, gets in the way, it's the arterial plaque, the drainpipe sludge, the rust, of computer systems.
The power of digital communication is space travel - it's possible for people far away to be involved, and time travel - people who weren't there see what happened. "Searchable" is the Siren's call, that's not its power, that's its road to Hell paved with good intentions.
[+] [-] MR4D|5 years ago|reply
And by big, I mean 40+ inches and resolution of 1080p or greater.
If you’ve ever tried it, you’ll see how incredible videoconferencing can actually be. It’s as different of an experience as Wolfenstein 3D was from the previous 2D map version. Totally different.
[+] [-] Angostura|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aantix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roland35|5 years ago|reply
Overall it does require people to take work from home seriously though! Back in the days when we worked in offices video calls did have less pets and random people or kids walk in!
If people are able to have a dedicated office this works better but obviously not everyone was prepared for a forced work from home experience. It does require a solid internet connection which has been strained lately.
[+] [-] ben509|5 years ago|reply
a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them
b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see
c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds
Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone.
It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1]
What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior.
Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around.
[1]: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481
[+] [-] neutronicus|5 years ago|reply
I see management sitting on a porch swing with beautiful scenery in the background and know I need to ask for a god-damn raise
[+] [-] vecio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] machinehermit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jojobas|5 years ago|reply
XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.
[+] [-] stubish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet.
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
And then you add a committee and the lowest common denominator doesn't change very fast.
[+] [-] rorykoehler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vecio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remir|5 years ago|reply
You can do audio/video calls and IM with it (using SIMPLE). The problem is being able to call people beyond your SIP servers. Companies don't want to allow it, probably because they don't want to have their service become a commodity.
[+] [-] pornel|5 years ago|reply
Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or awkward.
VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers" stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future.
For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets. Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.
[+] [-] skybrian|5 years ago|reply
It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind.
I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working during the pandemic.
[+] [-] rapnie|5 years ago|reply
https://www.noisolation.com/uk/komp/
[+] [-] tw04|5 years ago|reply
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collaboration-endpoin...
[+] [-] hbosch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kanox|5 years ago|reply
Why? Smartphones are already ubiquitous and there are plenty of extremely capable dirt-cheap models thanks to economies of stale.
Just get your grandma a $100 smartphone.
[+] [-] axegon_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm445|5 years ago|reply
Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.
[+] [-] nharada|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|5 years ago|reply
The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now.
It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to see what the Snap of business comms could look like.
[+] [-] ipiz0618|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] war1025|5 years ago|reply
My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea.
My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing.
We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat.
My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing.
Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.
[+] [-] bullen|5 years ago|reply
Positional 3D audio is the last frontier. But I'm not sure you will want it for public gatherings,
it should be a friends only thing in a sea of chat bubbles above the characters heads.
The chat feed is not interesting because the context is lost and trolling is too easy.
[+] [-] foxbarrington|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|5 years ago|reply
If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio, Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an interesting product.
[+] [-] neltnerb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenc|5 years ago|reply
The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance).
https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protoc...
It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...
It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai.
On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call.
EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.
[+] [-] jojobas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edoceo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little "ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.
[+] [-] Blackstone4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrkramer|5 years ago|reply
"we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|5 years ago|reply
For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.
[+] [-] zhte415|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicornk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I damn sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale."
Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply lost any further sales.
I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really wants.