The Death of (Video Conferencing) Interoperability

For nearly 25 years, one of the unwavering tenets of video conferencing was that all services and devices should work together.  Never really questioned but also strived for, each year brought us closer to this technology nirvana.  Key suppliers promised it was just around the corner or even here right now while skeptical customers complained about the gap between data sheet specifications and their all-too-real reality. 

I even founded a whole company called Vidtel in 2008 on the notion that while vendors might not get us to the promised land, surely a smart Silicon Valley startup could bring us there through clever implementation.  But a funny thing happened on the way to meeting this goal: people gave up and it ceased to matter.

 So what happened?

First, the market shifted away from the big vendors that produced an integrated hardware and software experience.  These vendors (notably Cisco, Polycom, and Lifesize) touted standards but often times, the basic interoperability worked but the back end was so complex, it made it nearly impossible to mix and match vendors. 

De facto single vendor implementations became the industry norm.   Once the sole domain of hardware, video conferencing became a software play using off-the-shelf hardware components.  That allowed many new vendors to focus on software and leverage Moore’s law for computing power.  Many of the software vendors found it easier to provide a consistent user experience by being proprietary. 

 The emergence of Skype

The second major event was Skype.  Skype showed the video conferencing world that people really wanted to use video conferencing and they cared more about it working well at very low costs (FREE!) vs. having it work together.  The brilliance of Skype was not in making the video work well but leveraging peer-to-peer technologies to relatively easily get around finicky firewall and NAT (e.g., Network Address Translation) settings to make video conferencing bullet proof. 

Standards would not work for that challenge and proprietary was the only real option.  Finally, being peer-to-peer meant that the expensive video streams could stay off the company servers, have a marginal cost of zero and drive video conferencing down to it’s current consumer price of free.

 Vidyo, Apple and “Standards”

Startup Vidyo moved the market further away from standards by convincing many in the enterprise that running real-time video over inconsistent networks like the internet was better served by being essentially proprietary vs. the standard but brittle approaches of the big guys from Polycom and Cisco.  Vidyo talked about standards but in reality was disdainful of any products using them even calling their interoperability device a “legacy gateway” when working with brand new devices.

Apple’s FaceTime did not even feign interest in interoperability or show up at standard bodies.  This was ironic because when FaceTime launched it was widely reported to be based on the most commonly used video conferencing standards of SIP for signaling and SRTP for media processing. 

 The final nail in the coffin

The nail in the interoperability coffin was what was already happening in a different but parallel industry: instant messaging or IM.  In the early days of IM, leaders AOL, ICQ and others started down the typical parallel path of a networking service: first proprietary, then standards bodies, and lastly the goal of making each service work together in harmonious bliss.  But what started that way, ended where we are today in complete proprietary silos.  Ultimately, the IM vendors decided they were better off keeping their walled gardens of users.  But then a stranger thing happened: end users just gave up and accepted the situation.  Some vendors offered an interoperable IM client but it did not work that well in practice and adoption rates has been surprisingly low.

 Frustrated IM users

End users gave up and were frustrated with the vendors feeble and half-hearted attempts at interop.  But more importantly, their behavior shifted and they just started downloading and running multiple software IM clients for as many services as they needed.

The move to mobile made this easier as consumers became used to downloading new apps whenever they wanted.  The barriers for adoption were lower and made it easier to break the stranglehold on formerly unassailable market leaders AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in favor of today’s titans Facebook (both Messenger and WhatsApp), Snapchat, etc.

 Back to video conferencing

 As actual video calls move from the prior standards-based conference rooms to off the shelf hardware (e.g., laptops, tablets, smart phones, PCs etc.), consumers and businesses are also moving into a multivendor world.  One meeting is in Skype, the next on BlueJeans, and in the afternoon on GoToMeeting all on the same device. 

Essentially the market is bifurcating into vendors that provide the best cloud service and vendors that provide the best hardware that works with the cloud services and importantly, allows users to easily move between services as an absolute requirement. 

Some still provide interoperability notably BlueJeans but the need to do so goes down every year as the older style quasi-standard conference room market continues to accelerate in its decline.

Is moving to proprietary platforms a problem for the corporate IT manager?  It does not have to be.  For a business buyer, one of the key challenges when moving to this new world is to ensure that they don’t migrate from one proprietary solution to another. 

 At Logitech, we are embracing this new world to ensure that this flexibility is extended from the desktop and mobile experience into the conference room.   As video conferencing explodes in the corporate market and gets democratized by these software-centric cloud players, we believe that the end user experience should not be compromised.

Just like every other technology throughout history there will be no single winner, and users should be looking for solutions that both work today and keep their options open for the future.