Most of you probably do not realize, but the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) employees are on strike here in the San Francisco area. And with temperatures regularly exceeding 100 degrees the last few days, it is creating a fairly hot situation. With ridership of almost 400,000 on weekdays, that is a lot of commuters to dump out onto already crowded roads. In some places the commute time has doubled, and many of those routes are already among the worst in the country.
One company has made an offer to help commuters out: Zoom, a new cloud video service entrant, is offering free video conferencing to Bay Area commuters. In the email I got announcing it, a great deal was made of how, "Zoom is a video conferencing system that provides HD solutions for those people who are unable to make it into the office. Unlike all other competitors in its industry Zoom does not require a Wi-Fi connection, allowing their customers the option to work from hope instead of flocking to their nearest coffee shop for an internet connection. Most importantly in this time of crisis, Zoom is free to users, offering unlimited HD video conferencing calls for up to 25 participants." (the "work from hope" was in the email--not my change).
This offer got me to thinking about two things: First, how remote communications use is accelerated in a crisis. A few years ago I was in China right after the SARs epidemic. SARs caused two major changes in work life in China: Many organizations adopted VoIP to allow their employees to work from home so they would not have to be exposed to the epidemic; and also, private car ownership soared as people no longer wanted to ride on buses or trains or in taxis.
This got me to thinking, having gone to the "World War Z" movie last weekend, could the new slogan for the video industry be: "Use Video Conferencing and Protect Yourself From Zombies!!!" The last thing you would want to do in a Zombie apocalypse is flock to a coffee shop--Remember the pub in "Shaun of the Dead"? Nothing worse than getting surrounded by Zombies whilst trying to use WiFi for your video conference.
Second, on a more somber note, the fact that the video proposed was not using WiFi, but rather mobile (cellular) wireless, led me to think about the cost ramifications of video conferencing on wireless. The implication in the announcement is that people would not use a home WiFi or go to a coffee shop for WiFi, which leads me to assume they are using 3G/4G for video.... My question is: "What is the impact on their data plans?"
On the Zoom web site it states that you should have up to 1MB/min--"zoom app will only send a maximum of 1MB/min of data in accordance with Apple's guideline for bandwidth usage for a data plan." This equates to 16 hours of conferencing per Gbyte of transmitted data. With many people having plans at only 2 Gbytes, if they are using half of their plan for other services, they have only 1 Gbyte or 16 hours per month for video conferencing before hitting their bandwidth overages. If they do 2-3 hours of video per day to avoid their commute, the strike needs to be settled quickly to prevent overages.
I guess the typo in the announcement email was indeed a Freudian slip: What was meant by "work from hope" is apparently the hope that an employer will pay the overage bill at the end of the month. It would seem to me that wireless video is a great inducement for the unlimited data plans as well.
On the other hand, at the average cost of $10/Gbyte (AT&T overage charge), that is only about 60 cents per 1-hour video meeting. Actually that is not bad for an hour video conference, albeit with relatively low quality video. It sure beats another hour commuting, burning gas at $4 per gallon.
The video quality seems to be fairly low; while it is full screen on a smartphone, on a tablet it is stated on the Zoom site as not being full screen. While I am not convinced of the real value of such small screen video in a business context (see this White Paper on Small Screen Video), I applaud Zoom for both trying to help out in a crisis and being a resourceful marketing company. Bring on Zombie Video!!!!
