Comments on: Video Chat is about to enter the Early Majority Phase with iPhone 4

By: » Apple explains video chat to the world - Embracing Chaos

» Apple explains video chat to the world - Embracing Chaos — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:21:23 +0000

[...] exactly what’s happening with video chat technology that I worked on at Google, as Apple pushes the technology into the early majority phase of adoption. Crossing the Chasm is the name of a classic book on innovation by Geoffrey Moore [...]

By: leodirac

leodirac — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:42:09 +0000

@Trager – I wouldn’t say I missed the fact that the image quality is really good. I deliberately didn’t try to guess what aspects of the experience Apple would improve on. It’s more a prediction on faith that Apple would figure out whatever it takes to make the experience good.

I know from personal experience that image quality is very important to a good video chat experience. Image quality has many aspects to it — resolution, compression artifacts, contrast, etc. all of which matter. Doing this whole thing well requires a huge amount of bandwidth and CPU power which I believe is fundamentally why it hasn’t yet caught on despite decades of serious attempts. In the iPhone 4’s case I would be very surprised if Apple’s not using dedicated hardware to speed up h.264 compression and decompression. An example of how economies of scale favor big companies as technology standardizes — Apple can afford custom codec chips for this stuff because they’re betting on big volume.

But image quality certainly isn’t the only thing that matters. Good audio is also extremely important and also surprisingly difficult. If your video is perfect but the audio echos or lags, the experience is horrible. “Ease of use” is another very fuzzy but critical requirement. Latency is also critical. In a good implementation latency will be network limited, but that requires excellent work on the codec and transport layers.

By: Trager

Trager — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:50:38 +0000

The one aspect of iPhone 4’s implementation of video chat that I think you missed out on is the image quality. Computer based video chat is always small relative to the screen size, or pixelated. The crazy DPI and excellent speed of the iPhone 4 makes it as if you have a window to the other party in your hand. Hard to explicate, but it is a much more satisfying form of video chat than anything I’ve seen before. The dual cameras and ready ability to switch mid-call adds to this, by the way. It’s incredibly easy and natural to say “look at this” to the other person and share whatever you’re observing.

By: Gavin Doughtie

Gavin Doughtie — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:45:47 +0000

At DreamWorks we co-developed and used what has become HP’s “Halo” video chat system — high bandwidth, high-definition, low latency chat on very large (wall-sized) HD screens in dedicated conference rooms. This is a spectacular system and miles ahead of any of the many Tandberg systems at Google. Still, we found ourselves traveling between the northern and southern California studios with some regularity, just for “high bandwidth”. There’s a lot of room for video chat to improve, with the ultimate goal always “just as good as being there”.

Facetime, in addition to having a commercial that literally brought tears to my eyes, is an interesting bludgeon to use on the telcos. Apple is saying “if you guys can’t handle this much data on the cellular network, we’re just going to use 802.11x, and you’re not going to be able to sell those minutes.”

By: leodirac

leodirac — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:02:28 +0000

I expect Facebook will build a video feature into their chat system soon enough. Having worked on the team that added video to Google’s existing chat system, I can tell you that it’s surprisingly difficult. Yes, the technology has been around for years, but doing it at all well is still a lot of work. My guess is that they’re hard at work on it right now.

By: macpaul

macpaul — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:41:06 +0000

I think what really brought video chat into the living room was iChat and Apple including webcams on their consumer Macs, it’s already commonly used since it’s just an additional feature within instant messaging. Including it on the iPhone is going to increase use but I was pretty disappointed to find out it can’t be used on the cellular network (surely this was at AT&T’s request). Video chat will go completely ‘mainstream’ when you can make a video call from anywhere to anyone, including to people still on a PC. The biggest flaw in FaceTime outside of it’s WiFi limitation is that you can’t initiate a video conversation with someone on a PC or Mac, it would have been perfect for iChat integration and it would have really grown the social potential of video chatting, but perhaps we’ll get that in a new OS release.

Speaking of social, I’m actually surprised that Facebook hasn’t made a meaningful attempt at getting on the videochat bandwagon, it’s a natural fit into their platform. Maybe it’s not on their current growth path though, which seems to be based on replicating the functionality of Twitter, Foursquare, and suddenly Yahoo Answers, around their massive existing user base.

Sooner or later Facebook and Apple will butt heads, but whether or not it’ll be about video chat, I don’t know.

By: cl3ft

cl3ft — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:14:26 +0000

What it really means for the rest of us is that the teenagers on the train will no longer hold a phone to their ear and talk loudly, they will yell at their phone at arms length.