What Comes After Zoom? 73
Analyst Benedict Evans writes: There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon's building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well.
There's lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be 'video' and then it will disappear inside. An important part of this is that there seem to be few real network effects in a video call per se. You don't necessarily need an account to join a call, and you generally don't need an application either, especially on the desktop -- you just click on a link in your calendar and the call opens in the browser. Indeed, the calendar is often the aggregation layer -- you don't need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone's contact list- effectively it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation -- it has no graph of its own.
Incidentally, one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a 'room', where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on 'people', where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it's a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) -- Apple's FaceTime is only people (no URLs). Taking this one step further, a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account, an app or a social graph to use it: Zoom made network effects irrelevant. But, that means Zoom doesn't have those network effects either. It grew by removing defensibility.
There's lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be 'video' and then it will disappear inside. An important part of this is that there seem to be few real network effects in a video call per se. You don't necessarily need an account to join a call, and you generally don't need an application either, especially on the desktop -- you just click on a link in your calendar and the call opens in the browser. Indeed, the calendar is often the aggregation layer -- you don't need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone's contact list- effectively it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation -- it has no graph of its own.
Incidentally, one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a 'room', where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on 'people', where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it's a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) -- Apple's FaceTime is only people (no URLs). Taking this one step further, a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account, an app or a social graph to use it: Zoom made network effects irrelevant. But, that means Zoom doesn't have those network effects either. It grew by removing defensibility.
After Zoom? (Score:5, Funny)
A speeding ticket?
Re:After Zoom? (Score:5, Funny)
What comes after zoom is pan. Every aspiring filmmaker knows that.
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...and after all the above, comes internet porn on a webcam.
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Pan and tilt? (Score:2)
It's the next logical evolution of built-in webcams.
If my work schedule is any indication... (Score:4, Funny)
After Zoom comes more Zoom, and then another Zoom.
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and then a "boom boom"...
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Well played, sir!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Amazon Chime (Score:4, Informative)
The problem I've seen with similar APIs in the past (hello, Twilio) is the serious lack of reliability, where "five 9s" really means, "we'll refund you some of your money at the end of the year in the SLA because our service is guaranteed to go down."
Video in everything? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Totally agree, the Brady Bunch look on the screen provides zero value for me.
Re:Video in everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
TL;DR- Consider using your cam for the benefit of the speaker.
Re:Video in everything? (Score:5, Informative)
If I open a browser window and overlay it just below my laptop camera, I can browse Slashdot while the speaker think I am looking right at him.
I am doing that right now.
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If I open a browser window and overlay it just below my laptop camera, I can browse Slashdot while the speaker think I am looking right at him.
See, now it makes a lot of sense.
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Do you speak much at these online meetings? I am often giving presentations on these platforms and from that point of view, I respectfully disagree that seeing others on camera has no value. For the speaker, being able to see the listeners moves the experience from "I am speaking at my screen with no idea if anyone is even listening" to "I am getting some (limited) feedback while I speak". The latter is much better. TL;DR- Consider using your cam for the benefit of the speaker.
Have ever used a phone before? It's like that.
Re: Video in everything? (Score:2)
Benett Haselton returns! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Same here. I had never given it much thought but it comes down to two models. 1) Create a meeting place (URL based). 2) Create connections (end point based) Zoom was the first to make it simple enough for the average person to join meetings without getting caught up installing and configuring a client.
Where this will go from here? No idea. Maybe we will see a/v calls integrated into things we never thought we would want or need. OMG I can see the marketing folks now, trying to embed an automatic
Is this what an "analyst" does? (Score:2)
Re:Is this what an "analyst" does? (Score:5, Funny)
Hang on, let me toss that up in my creativity wok & see if it reinvents any vertical niches that redefine synergistic partnerships for streamlining strategic content. If it can e-enable front-end deliverables to engineer clicks-and-mortar platforms, we could visualize frictionless mindshare.
Either that or some marketing people have finally discovered WebRTC. Anal-ist is just another word for PR & marketing "consultant."
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I always use this:
http://pasta.phyrama.com:8083/... [phyrama.com]
Re:Is this what an "analyst" does? (Score:4)
Did you read the essay? What "corporate buzzwords are you referring to?
It's interesting as tech essays go. It's an analysis of what Zoom has done to become successful, and draws some interesting parallels to how other technologies have evolved (VoIP, photo sharing, file sharing). If you aren't interested in that, what are you here for? The politics?
Zoom did this? (Score:5, Informative)
a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account
Zoom was founded by a guy who worked at WebEx, a company who has been doing exactly what Zoom started doing in 2013, but back in the 1990s. You do need an account (albeit free) to start a meeting and their business model is a standard "free-tier with paid upgrade" model that the entire industry uses. Exactly what credit does Zoom deserve (other than being very successful at running the company) for changing how people use video? This sounds like the rantings of a guy that just discovered web-based video conferencing. The only thing that's really changed is that now everyone is walking around with the requisite hardware in their pocket, and we have cheap-enough data plans so that people aren't afraid to use it.
What they did was no account for most. (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly what credit does Zoom deserve (other than being very successful at running the company) for changing how people use video?
You are way undercutting the credit Zoom deserves for having only the meeting organizer have to have an account, but also even the client install was almost zero touch... that greatly spread the reach of people who used them.
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Almost all of them are insanely easy. The easiest actually have the most problems
You have a different definition of 'easy' than most people.
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I have to agree with the OP. For whatever reasons, Zoom seems to be the first that made it easy for the average person. If you're on /. then it is likely that your definition of easy is different than non-tech people.
Re:Zoom did this? (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly what credit does Zoom deserve (other than being very successful at running the company) for changing how people use video?
It. Just. Fucking. Works.
That's it. WebEx sucked. Google Gangout sucked. Zoom just works.
Re: Zoom did this? (Score:2)
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And yes, try giving a technical presentation to forty people in a foreign language and having no video reactions.
Forty? Say four hundred. I've done that. No video. And guess what, it worked. Maybe half of them phased out. Maybe three quarters phased out. Their problem, not mine. But I know at least half were paying attention (hint: polls during presentation).
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Zoom account/app (Score:2)
"aking this one step further, a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account, an app or a social graph to use it: Zoom made network effects irrelevant. But, that means Zoom doesn't have those network effects either"
I wish I had known more about VC before I went to the Zoom.
Zoom website where , options are many but "Sign Up Free:" is a big focal point. Gotta register, down the rabbitt hole I went.
Clicking on an URL of a meeting, asks me to download app, in invisible print is
video is the only way to visit inmates at $24.99 f (Score:2, Interesting)
video is the only way to visit inmates at $24.99 for 30 min
So... many... buzzwords... (Score:2)
I feel like my head is about to kersplode!
The only people who throw around so many buzzwords when talking about tech are people who don’t really have much of a grasp of the subject, but are trying to pretend they do.
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The big takeaway willl be... (Score:3)
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The big takeaway we discovered was we don't have to pay people to travel for in-person meetings. This will be a fundamental change going forward for us.
I mentioned this years ago and was ignored. It only takes a pandemic to figure out there's different ways of doing things...
Video not needed (Score:5, Interesting)
At first most used video, but with the lockdown shutting down beauty parlors many women opted to not use it, and pretty soon almost no one was using it except for suits with their vanity to toot their horn... it's just like the videophone getting invented every decade starting with the 1960s but only getting a fad market. I still have one meeting a week where everyone uses video for no good reason....
Who wants to see their coworkers and vendors?, not me.
Re: Video not needed (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it a lot more energy-consuming to have a 2-hour group meeting over the phone than in person (by about a factor of 2). I can't tell you why. I just observe my mind "staring" hard into the phone/audio, probably to try and reach out for more information to fill the gap that's left behind by lacking non-verbal queues.
I haven't had enogh long group video meetings yet to be able to tel (video hardware not prevalent enough to do it spontaneously), but from few short calls it seems like video is less tiresome to me than audio-only.
So if I'm not the only one who feels like this, this might be a legitimate reason why video calls could become a thing...
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I agree - video is easier than telephone for "hard" meetings. For the daily standup, it honestly doesn't make much difference. For big meetings (20+ people) video probably makes things worse, for for half a dozen people or so, video works quite well.
The good thing about video is you get out-of-band feedback. That is, you're saying something and you can see a couple of people nodding along like they agree with it. That means you don't need to keep stopping to make sure people have heard and understood or agr
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But you most have people that are actually saying something, i'm talking about suits knowing little tooting their horn with very little to say
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Who wants to see their coworkers and vendors?, not me.
So much communication is done from visual cues. You must be missing a piece of your brain! ;-)
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The suits aren't actually saying much though, it's duckspeak.
Something with lower latency (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully after Zoom comes something with lower latency than Zoom has, or alternatively some scheme for making latency less aggravating, although I don't know what that would be.
It's really annoying to spend half a meeting watching my co-workers both try to speak at the same time, then both realize they are interrupting each other, back off, wait 3 seconds, and both try to speak again at the exact same time, and repeat. It's 10MB/sec hub-based Ethernet with ALOHA protocol all over again, except much slower.
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Get your work to use Mumble or Discord? :)
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Yeah, that problem is really annoying. And happens on voice-only calls as well. But I think light-speed latency is enough to be problem, so it's not obvious how to solve it.
It isn't. Remember POTS phone calls? You may not be old enough. There was never ever any crosstalk that wasn't intentional. Encoding latency is HIGH by human conversational standards for codecs commonly used in computers.
There's very little effort being spent on low latency codecs. Fraunhofer Institute had ULD for a while, but it vanished into the memory hole. Qualcomm is pushing aptX, which is 2 ms. Codec2 [rowetel.com] is 20-40 ms. Xiph had CELT, now part of Opus, which is 5 ms. For comparison, AAC, MP3, and V
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Hopefully after Zoom comes something with lower latency than Zoom has, or alternatively some scheme for making latency less aggravating, although I don't know what that would be. It's really annoying to spend half a meeting watching my co-workers both try to speak at the same time, then both realize they are interrupting each other, back off, wait 3 seconds, and both try to speak again at the exact same time, and repeat.
Are you sure that's a latency thing? I have three hypothesis for the cause of this phenomenon: (1) latency as you say, (2) something in the human brain that relies upon extra cues that aren't currently transmitted in our audio+video streams, (3) half-duplex devices that aren't good enough at both transmitting and receiving at the same time.
My money's on (2). I think that in real-world meetings we pick up on just an intake of breath to know that someone's going to speak -- the kind of audio that gets deliber
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I tested out joining a meeting on my phone so I could be prepared for questions from my older relatives when I sent them invites. Since I had the host device and a participant device in the same room, I could easily hear the latency.
Oh I agree there's latency. The question is whether latency is the cause of the "two people speaking then two people back off" issue.
Stupid people shouldn't try to steer tech. (Score:1)
Piss on Zoom all you want but don't use it as an excuse to tear down the validity of native HTTP paradigms. If that's your real complaint about all of this you need to read some fucking books first and then revise your argument.
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You misspelled "HTTPS".
$1.60 for a call? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Obviously ... (Score:2)
What Comes After Zoom?
Zoomed.
Or ... (Score:2)
What Comes After Zoom?
Zoomed.
Zoometric
Stop talkig about Zoom like it is a thing, luddite (Score:2)
You don't get to decide what's a thing! You can't tell TLS from TLC! You installed Zoom, instead of Jitsi Meet, and Whatsapp instead of Signal, for fuck's sake!
Who lets luddites write tech news anyway?
Surveillance (Score:3)
What comes after Zoom? More surveillance.
If things like Zoom become normalised, then having your face scanned regularly at a relatively high resolution will also become normal. All kinds of algorithms might scan your face for signs of weight gain, skin cancer, mood and emotional stability, opportunities to sell make-up, etc. People who don't upload selfies yet (my front camera has a sticker on it) would become easier to scan too.
Since a lot of these cameras are inside homes, they might also allow for more analysis of the inside of homes. What things you own, what your style is, etc.
With these video streams it's also easy to use photogrammetry to create detailed 3D models of faces. As 'face unlock' login options have also become more popular, it may also impact device security.
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Since a lot of these cameras are inside homes, they might also allow for more analysis of the inside of homes. What things you own, what your style is, etc.
This is why you use a virtual backdrop.
Real OS and network support... (Score:2)
Of course, this won't actually happen. Supporting the needed bandwidth reservation and protocol support would require some upgrades that the US doesn't have (you know, more symmetrical upload and download speeds, etc).
I'd be happy with a ultra low latency group audio only client. Music jams online, clear conference calls. Sure, it's a challenge to do over a wide area network, but that kind of innovation leads to new ideas.
According to Merriam-Webster... (Score:2)
I'll stick with Cisco (Score:2)
The big issue with WhatsApp (Score:2)
is that it doesn't just use the phone numbering system: it is limited to mobile phones only. The Windows/Mac OS clients are only usable if you have Whatsapp installed on your phone as well.
Gibberish (Score:2)
Bang? (Score:2)
Facebook :( (Score:1)