This was an intersting post. a bit O.T but it works. lol!
The Ten Deadly Sins of Mobile Video Calling - Sins 1-5: Technology
Since the dawn of humanity, mankind has always sought to communicate. Back in
the beginning, things were simple. Grunts, pointing of fingers, clubbing on the
head. Primitive, but it got the message across.
Mankind quickly discovered that it needed a way to communicate when the other
person isn't right next to you. And so began a long series of inventions over
centuries of time. Cave drawings, the written word, paper, the postal system
and finally the arrival of electronic communications: The telegraph, the
telephone. The telephone network was virtually transformed from the inside out
when it went digital in the middle of the 20th century.
The next big revolution, of course, was mobile calling and the arrival of
cellular networks. Ultimately it still provided the same old service as the
wired telephone network did, but you could take it with you. With the Internet,
a whole host of new communications services emerged - most notably email and
IM. Ultimately though, these were just different manifestations of an old idea
- sending text from one person to another. The telegraph had that too, decades
prior. It just wasn't quite as easy to use. The Internet also brought the
arrival of Voice over IP. In many ways, Voice over IP has been hugely
successful. But when we look at it closely, it is also - to a large degree -
another repackaging of what we have already been doing - voice, communicated
over a distance. It got cheaper, and it got easier to use. But, was it really
more - was it really better?
Not really. And that's what's startling here. When we look at communications,
especially in modern times, what we find is that there have been huge advances
in the things that surround real-time communications, but not the
communications itself. Look at the mobile phone. This is a technology whose
change over the last 20 years - even the last decade - is nothing short of
phenomenal. Compare the original Motorola brick phone to the iPhone 4 -
astounding. But as a phone - as a service for communications - you get almost
the same experience. 20 years ago, we dialed numbers and we got tinny voice
conversations. Today I get the same experience.
One of the things Skype is doing is trying to make this calling experience
better.
With the SILK codec, we've introduced super-wideband voice calling to mobile
devices around the world, enabling crisper conversations, easier interpretation
of accents and an overall high quality voice experience. But voice is just the
first step. To more fundamentally transform the communications experience, we
needed to add video. And so we did.
The idea of video calling is certainly not new. The first videophone was shown
at the World's Fair in 1964 - ages ago. The technology wasn't there yet, and it
is only in recent years that video communications has gone mainstream. How
mainstream? Well - let me share some of our statistics.
On average, 42% of Skype-to-Skype calls include video* and the number is
probably even higher at peak times - around New Year celebrations, for example.
And, Skype-to-Skype calling minutes are equivalent to approximately 20% of all
global international PSTN and Skype-to-Skype calling minutes.**
Where video is going next is mobile. 2010 was undoubtedly the year that video
calling arrived on mobile. Mobile video calling is also not new - we've seen a
long line of failed mobile video products over many years. But we're still at
the beginning of mobile video. Getting mobile video right is actually really
hard. Indeed, there are - in essence - ten deadly sins of mobile video, each of
which, if not adequately addressed, can stop the technology dead in its tracks.
They fall into three categories, which I'll explore in this blog post and two
more later this week.
The first bunch of them are related to technology.
Sin 1: No cameras
Simple, but a big deal. Without a camera in the front of the phone, you are
simply not going to have a video conference call. You might have a
see-what-I-see experience using the rear camera - and Qik is great for this -
but you really want both. Though phones with front facing cameras have been
available outside of the US, they were never mainstream and never made their
way stateside. That changed (finally) last year with the iPhone4 and iPod
touch, which brought front facing cameras mainstream. Android phones have
caught on now too, and we're seeing a bunch of them roll out now with front
facing cameras. Great - and fortunately for us, advancements in technology are
squashing this sin.
Sin 2: Lousy screens
Video needs screen real estate. Until recently, we just didn't have it. Prior
to the arrival of devices like the iPhone and the Motorola DROID, screens were
generally small and had meager resolutions too. Now, we finally have what we
need - screens which are the size of the phone with resolutions that can show
video crisp enough to see the smile on someone's face.
And so, once again, general advancements in technology have addressed this
problem too.
Sin 3: Slow networks
Video needs a lot more bandwidth than voice. Our iPhone app needs about 600Kb/s
to make a decent video call. Until a few years ago, you just couldn't get that
kind of speed on a mobile phone. Two things have addressed this:
• The arrival of 3G cellular networks, which often (but not always)
have enough bandwidth to carry a mobile video call.
• The widespread availabiity of WiFi on smartphones. WiFi is not
without problems, but at least it tends to provide the bandwidth needed for a
video call. Fortunately, many calls - video or otherwise - happen in either the
home or the workplace. Those are the two places many users have WiFi enabled on
their phones.
Put together, WiFi and 3G cellular networks mean that bandwidth is available in
many more locations, making video calls possible.
Sin 4: Slow processors
Video not only requires more bandwidth than voice; it requires more CPU
resources too. Encoding a QVGA video stream on a typical smartphone consumes a
sizeable percentage of the CPU resources when performed in the main processor.
Higher resolutions are out of reach of the CPU, and require hardware assistance
from dedicated encoding chips.
To be fair, this isn't just a problem for mobile phones - it's still a problem
for PCs. The typical modern PC is still not powerful enough to encode an HD
video stream in realtime. Even VGA doesn't work on many PCs yet. No surprise
that it is barely possible on the majority of mobile devices.
The situation around hardware acceleration of video encoding and decoding is
also a big problem right now. On some platforms, there is hardware accelerated
functionality, but it is not available to third-party applications like Skype,
and iOS is an example of this. Facetime uses hardware acceleration to improve
quality, but those improvements are not available through the iOS API.
The problem isn't just about raw CPU horsepower. It's also about latency.
Realtime communications - both voice and video - are really sensitive to
delays. For an ideal experience, you want the amount of time it takes between
when one person speaks to when the other person hears to be under 150
milliseconds.
Think about it like this: In order to have a mobile video call, video frames
must be captured from the camera, sent through the phone hardware, and
processed by the software on the phone - on both sides, all in a timely fashion.
Unfortunately, the video camera systems on many phones were designed for
streaming video and recording, which has much more relaxed delay requirements.
As a result, many phones on the market today have hundreds of milliseconds of
delay just for capturing a video frame and making it available to the software
on the phone. The problem is even more complex on Android, where the variety of
different phones, each with differing hardware and designs, make life even
harder for developers like Skype.
Sin 5: Poor UI
It's amazing how easy it is to design a bad UI. The UI for mobile video has to
make it dead simple to use. It's easy to focus on the obvious stuff - selecting
contacts, making the call, hanging up the call. But the harder stuff has to be
handled too.
The biggest hurdle is figuring out whether the person you want to call has the
right equipment in the first place. This isn't specific to video - it has been
a major complaint of users in adoption of online communication products in
general. For video, we now have to factor in the question of whether the person
you want to call has a camera or not. Does the device they are on even support
video? How do you let the person you want to call know that everything is
'ready' in intuitive ways? How do you identify and find people who you can call?
Then there are other complexities - do you allow people to make voice-only
calls? What about shutting off video? How does the other side know that a video
shut-off is not a consequence of a problem? Should you let them know that the
sender cancelled their video or does that complicate the UI? How do you let the
other side know that your video is being received?
These problems are surmountable, but will require time and investment in UI.
These items - the cameras, the screens, the processors, the networks, and the
UI - all of them are likely to improve over time with the never-ending
improvements in technology. However, even if we eliminate all of these
problems, there are others which technology itself is unlikely to solve. Those
are the problems I'll be covering in my next posts.
* For the fourth quarter 2010
** TeleGeography, January 2011
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