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Is Video the New Voice?

Video is good; video is definitely useful; and even so, video is not the new voice.

"Video is the new voice". Nice slogan.

When John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, says it, I want to believe him.

I really do like the slogan. I like the alliteration. It is simple, clear and concise, all the things a good slogan should be.

It is also based on a proven template: "a is the new b". Doing a Google search for the phrase "is the new black" yields over 7 million hits! We find that red, green, cheetah, orange, frost, pink, white, wine, brown, and camel, amongst others, are all the new black.

So we have a good slogan following a proven template; but is video the new voice? I suspect not.

Video is good; video is definitely useful; and even so, video is not the new voice.

In order to understand why I believe video is not the new voice, let's look at the evolution to voice communications. And what voice is.

Drums, Smoke and Voice
First there were drums. Under ideal conditions, messages sent by drum sound could be understood at 8 km (5 miles) (Wikipedia).

Smoke signals passed from tower to tower allowed messages to be relayed as far as 300 miles in only a few hours according to HowStuffWorks. (The site also provides details on how to send your own smoke signals should you conclude that "smoke is the new voice".) The Vatican still uses different colored smoke to communicate during the election of a new Pope: Black smoke means no pope.

In the 1790s the semaphore system (i.e. flag waving) played a key part in the French revolution.

Drums, smoke and flags all shared the drawback that anyone could intercept the message, hence often coded messages were employed.

In the early 1800s the electric telegraph was first being experimented with. In 1866 the first transatlantic electric telegraph message was transmitted.

The telephone was first demonstrated to the world at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In 1877 the Bell Telephone Company was formed. The era of voice was at hand.

By the end of 2009, there were a total of nearly 6 billion telephone subscribers worldwide. This included 1.25 billion fixed-line subscribers and 4.6 billion mobile subscribers.

Voice via the telephone was ubiquitous. Every home, every office, every hotel, every restaurant and, in the year 2000, 2 million pay phones in the U.S, all provided you with a voice connection.

Because a voice connection was available anywhere, it was easy to call when you "got there", call if you were going to be late, or find a phone booth and call for directions if you got lost (although many would say this was never easy for most of us men!)

With the advent of the mobile phone, voice became even closer, virtually always at hand, or for the geekier of us, strapped to our belts in a little leather pouch. Now you could call to say you were arriving even as you pulled up. You could call to say you would be late even while still desperately speeding to your destination. You could call for directions in the car before you got hopelessly lost (although still this seemed difficult for most of us men).

Especially with the adoption of mobile phones, the "old voice" was accessible almost everywhere; it was quick and easy, and it was mostly private (as long as you didn’t talk too loud).

So any "new voice" should also be accessible, quick, easy and mostly private.

IMHO OMG LOL
With the advent of the mobile phone, another communication modality also arose: text messaging. (Note that corporate email with its virtually instant send and receive capability along with instant messaging is the functional equivalent of text messaging.)

Texting was accessible, as almost everyone now carries a mobile phone, it is even quicker and it is exceptionally private, allowing you to text/email unobtrusively (even at times when you shouldn't be).

Locational and social cues
Voice based communications sent along some social and locational cues. If you were at a party calling, but pretending you were still at the office working, you might need to find a quiet corner before placing the call. Even calling from a quiet corner, if you were at the party a little too long, and had perhaps hoisted a few too many pints, your speech (or slurring thereof) could alert the recipient that perhaps you were no longer at the office.

Texting or emailing can communicate the message without passing along any additional social or locational cues.

Sometimes this can be a bad thing, like when someone reads your message with a serious tone when it was written in jest. But often this is a good thing as additional background information is not inadvertently passed along with the primary message.

I can safely text from the loudest of parties without any indication of background noise. Even if I am texting while simultaneously imbibing I can safely blame any typos on "fat fingers" or T9 predictive text issues. I can text/email in the middle of a meeting, arguably without disrupting the meeting flow.

Video, on the other hand, passes along a bevy of social and locational cues. You can see where I am, what I'm wearing, who I am with, how many empty beer bottles are perched on my desk.

During a video call it is not as easy for me to ignore the presenter and check my email. It is not as easy to simply put my microphone on mute and have a conversation with someone else in my office.

Ready, Set, Communicate
A voice call requires some "setup time". I need to dial and wait for the other party to answer before passing along my information--either to the callee or to their automated attendant, aka voice mail.

Texting requires virtually no setup time as I simply tap in my message, hit send, and am confident the other party gets the information immediately or as soon as they next check their phone. Texting is a "fire and forget" type of message missile, even better than voicemail.

Voicemail might cause a little light to flash, which is often ignored. Yet text messages pop right up on the home screen of many mobile communications devices.

Video on the other hand, requires the "long setup". Because I often work from home, initiating or receiving a video call could require me to shower, shave, change out of my pajamas, place academic looking books on the bookcase behind me, perhaps even paint my office walls: "I'm sorry Kevin is not available at this time to accept your video call, please call back next week."

Do You Really Care What I'm Having for Dinner?
I spend a lot of time in the car, driving between meetings.

Many times, I am able to use my bluetooth headset and participate in conference calls or follow-up with colleagues while driving. How does video as the new voice assist me here?

I also happen to multi-task, like many of you.

I have been known to pickup my kids from school, grab a few items at the grocery store, or start preparing dinner all while engaged in work discussions. Not sure the new voice would help me here either.

Boss/admin functionality, compliance journaling, Intellectual property and content filtering all become larger challenges if video becomes the de facto modality of communication.

However, despite these issues, the Pew Internet Project found 23% of Internet users had tried some form of video chat and 7% of mobile phone users had tried video calling. This nets out to almost a fifth of Americans having tried video calling of some form. So there definitely is interest in video.

And yet it is difficult to predict how quickly this initial experimentation will grow into regular use. Steven Schnaars and Cliff Wymbs, in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change, explain that the first American demonstration of the videophone was on November 14, 1920, when pictures were wired between New York and St Louis. In 1975, Telecom Australia predicted up to 200,000 videophones in Australia by 2000. The actual figure: about 50.

Now maybe I am being "old fashioned"? Perhaps I am being like Rutherford Hayes, the 19th President of the United States who remarked, after seeing a demonstration of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, "It's a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?"

I suspect I will never be President. And even if I, like Rutherford, am guilty of not embracing the future, remember even when people use video services, the primary message is communicated via voice. Video is just embellishment; it is visual icing on the content cake. Video is like fancy fonts and colored backgrounds in an email.

Video cannot be the new voice because it does not replace voice--unless we all intend to become very good at charades. At best, video could be argued to make voice better.

Text is the New Voice
Text on the other hand is the new voice. Or in keeping with my enjoyment of alliteration, "text is the new talk".

Based on usage, texting has taken over from voice calling as the most used form of communication, especially amongst teenagers. And if one includes the estimated 294 billion emails sent per day (granted 90% are estimated to be spam) then text communications clearly rule over voice.

Nielsen reported American teens on average send or receive 3,339 texts a month. A Pew Research study reported two thirds of teens say they are more likely to use their cell phones to text their friends than talk to them.

And it is not just teens. As early as 2008 CNET news reported US mobile subscribers sent and received 357 text messages per month versus 204 phone calls per month. Texting adults (65%) send or receive a median of ten texts a day, according to Pew Research.

And because texting is accessible, quick, easy and mostly private, I would argue that "text is the new talk". While I suspect we won't hear John Chambers using this slogan any time soon it is in fact closer to the current, and I suspect future, truth.

Video is Good
For formal, planned meetings, I really enjoy room-based video conferencing.

So maybe "video is the new business meeting voice". Not the catchiest of slogans.

Videoconferencing has saved me travel time (although I still needed to travel from my home office to the telepresence room at the office.)

In a telepresence meeting, I often quickly forget some attendees are in a different room--this is very powerful. I am certain I could read the notes my remote colleague was writing in his notebook more clearly than if he was in the same room.

I've also used desktop video to "meet" a colleague before flying out to meet him in person. This avoided the awkward "meet up" process at the airport.

Using video, I can see someone’s eyes "glaze over" as I drone on about the need to determine the best communication solution based on business requirements. This helps me know I need to get to the point.

And my point is this, video is useful, but video is not the new voice.