When I first heard Chambers talk about "consumer Telepresence" I must admit, I was a bit skeptical. John then tried to use him and Wim Elfrink (who now lives in India) as proof points since they both have it in their homes, but I suspect that both individuals get a decent discount and are a bit outside the income bracket of most of the readers of this blog!! I later realized that I was thinking about consumer Telepresence the wrong way. I do believe that in corporations, Telepresence will be a significant component of most organizations' collaboration tools, so its primary use will be for individuals or groups to have face to face meetings where the parties want to create as lifelike an environment as possible.
In the consumer space though, I think entertainment will lead the way for Telepresence. At a price point of $5,000 and up, I really do not think people communicating with their loved ones is a large enough driver to purchase a Telepresence system. So what do people care enough about to drive Telepresence in the home? The answer is sports and entertainment. Thinking about the die hard, pay $300 to sit in the green monster seats Red Sox fans that I know, I can easily see this group of people paying that kind of money or more to have "virtual season tickets."
For those who haven't seen the demos or at least thought of the concept, one of the use cases that Cisco has given for Telepresence is to have it be an integral part of the new Oakland A's (boo!) stadium, Cisco Field. The concept would be that the field would be lined with high quality cameras that could project the view of the field from any angle to the large Telepresence screen in front of you. It would be like looking out a window and being able to change the angle. If you want to sit right behind home plate, go ahead, if you like being down the first base line, that's fine too. If you want to see a replay, go ahead and run it. In short, the immersive experience that anyone has experienced in a Telepresence session would be brought to the field of sports like it has been into our work environments. Considering people (like me) already drop $3,000 to $4,000 on new, flat screen TVs in their home, I can see people shelling out an additional few thousand more to enable virtual sports or other type of entertainment and then some kind of annual fee to pay for the ongoing service. Outside of just the Red Sox (is there anything else?), I can see virtual concerts, high end gaming and, of course, people using the systems to communicate with friends and loved ones.
For the service providers, the guys that own the pipes into the home, a consumer Telepresence system could be significant in driving upgrades of network services where the value proposition is more than just cheaper access. Verizon has been rolling out FiOS for a few years now and much of the value proposition is that it's cheaper than cable but gets you similar content. In fact, if you look at the FiOS website, the text "Plans starting at $42.99" jumps out the page at you, and now how the overall Internet experience is better. A service that allows Verizon customers a totally immersive entertainment experience would drive FiOS uptake through the roof and it's something that cable, in its current format, really could not compete with. Because of this, service providers that can offer a fiber based service capable of supporting Telepresence should consider subsidizing the purchase of the system or the service for the first year to drive adoption of it.
So, is TTToIP the next big thing for Telepresence? Probably not, but just as the Xbox, Playstation, Wii gaming systems evolved from "pong" on an old Telstar system perhaps the future uses of Telepresence starts with John Chambers playing Tic Tac Toe.
