Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302260477
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY CARLA LAZZARESCHI LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
AT&T STILL TRYING TO FIND A MARKET FOR VIDEO PHONES
It didn't take long for Jerry Ganz to figure out how to get the most from his new $1,000 picture telephone: He bought seven more of the "see-and-say" gadgets and passed them out to his children and grandchildren.After all, the retired Marin County, Calif., investor realized: what's the point of owning such a pricey phone if the people you talk with often don't have one too.
The Ganz family is better off than most consumers who have bought into American Telephone & Telegraph's second attempt in 25 years to bring home the picture phone. With only an estimated 4,000 of these devices sold in the last six months - usually in pairs - most users have just one other person with whom to share the picture-phone experience.
The concept of visual communications, combining the immediacy of a phone call with the panorama of a home camcorder, has been around since the dawn of the television age. About 70 years ago, AT&T originally saw the home TV as an accessory to the telephone: the video screen for Ma Bell's audio lines. Ever since, the nation's largest phone company has been trying to make that vision come true.
But AT&T and other communications companies have something grander in mind for tomorrow's picture phones than just allowing two "talking heads" to carry on a conversation. Already, they are pushing ahead with ambitious plans to connect our telephones to high-speed video networks and powerful personal computers to bring a vast array of new entertainment, services and advertising into the home.
"The picture phone is a build-up to a range of on-screen communications," says Robert Kraut, director of interpersonal communications studies at Bellcore, the research arm for the regional Bell phone companies. "We won't just be looking at people. We'll be watching advertisements and films, making purchases from video catalogs and tapping into the computers that manage our bank accounts and stock portfolios."
Although sales of AT&T's new picture phone have been painfully slow, a raft of telecommunications companies are betting that this is all about to change. Why now? For one thing, the exploding use of video in corporate America has made many more people familiar with the idea of visual communication. New technology that turns an office computer into a desktop picture phone is just now hitting the market. And a new generation of video-savvy consumers weaned on television, home movies and Nintendo will be a prime target for electronic gizmos that satisfy visual appetites.
"We weren't the video society in 1964" - when AT&T unveiled its first picture phone at the New York World's Fair - "that we are today," says James Keating, Pacific Bell's vice president for video communication services. "As people get used to this equipment at work, they will want it in their homes."
But that's far from a foregone conclusion. Market acceptance has been so painfully slow that a second rejection of the picture phone seems a foregone conclusion to many. AT&T "never learned the lesson from the first bomb," says Michael Noll, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications. "People don't necessarily want to be seen while they're talking on the phone - especially at home."
Furthermore, several studies - including some conducted for telephone companies - have shown that seeing the person on the other end of a phone call doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the conversation. According to this conclusion, drawn over the last 20 years of research, visual contact is unnecessary - and often an obstacle - in calls where the primary motive is sharing information.
Nevertheless, the promise of visual communications has picked up enormous momentum in the last two years, the result, in part, of the recession's chilling effects on corporate travel budgets and marked improvements in technology.
The effects are being seen first in the demand for video conferencing equipment by businesses.
Because it relies on existing copper telephone lines and still-evolving software, today's video conferencing technology is rudimentary compared to its future promise, supporters say. For example, on today's most sophisticated systems, the video and audio are somewhat out of sync, giving the conversation an unnatural quality.
Advances in computer, television and telephone technologies, however, should improve the systems' sound and picture quality. More built-in computer power should allow users to manipulate the images, such as pictures, graphs and maps, they are sharing over the video phones.
Despite today's limitations, sales of conferencing equipment - including video cameras and the sophisticated gear that compresses a video signal to fit over ordinary telephone wires - reached an estimated $300 million in 1992. This year sales should exceed $500 million, according to Telespan, an Altadena, Calif.-based market research firm.
Although travel expense savings initially fueled equipment sales, even more important, say executives who use them, is the time saved by holding video meetings.
"It's simple for us to have a two-hour status session with people all over the United States and walk back to our offices and get back to our work," says Kevin Kean, a product manager at Tandem Computer in California's Silicon Valley. "The time we don't spend sitting in airplanes and airport waiting rooms is time we can spend making money."
The nation's legal system, where much can hang on nuance, presentation and behavior, has been among the first groups to take advantage of video conferencing.
Uses include deposition-taking, suspect arraignments, conversations with lawyers and family jail visits, where direct face-to-face meetings pose a security risk. Lawyers are also able to show their jailed clients weapons and other evidence via video that they would be unable to bring into prisons.
Other industries that have been quick to embrace video conferencing are those with a need to exchange blueprints, technical drawings and maps, such as aerospace and semiconductor manufacturers and oil exploration companies.
Despite its apparent simplicity, video conversation demands more structure and discipline from its participants than face-to-face sessions or audio-only exchanges. And, for some, the medium can interfere with the message.
For example, the technology imposes a bit of a dress code.
Because ordinary phone lines cannot transmit the 90 million bits of information per second that a video signal carries, today's video conferencing systems can't carry a television-quality picture. The upshot: no stripes, plaids, loud colors or busy prints that impose an extra load on the equipment. The camera also adds pounds to your image, so tailored apparel is highly recommended.
Behavior at meetings is also changed by the presence of the camera. Even the best video conferencing equipment is stymied when a speaker is interrupted by extraneous sounds, such as uncontrolled outbursts and side conversations. Fidgeting and excessive movement by participants can also overload the system, distorting the transmission.
"There are protocols and techniques for using this technology successfully," says Virginia A. Ostendorf, a Denver-area video conferencing consultant and publisher.