It’s 2016, why is video conferencing still terrible? | Hacker News Reader

It’s 2016, why is video conferencing still terrible?

medium.com

26 pointscalchris4233 comments

The core problem is that we no longer create protocol standards. This has been discussed on Hacker News before, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10256479. Each company creates their own protocol (usually piggybacked over HTTP or WebRTC) and no one agrees to unify or share their details.

The proper way to do this would be to get several companies and the IETF + EFF or GNU (or some other libre organization) together in a room and hash out a protocol standard using RFCs. Then clients can be written to that spec. See HTML, Email, TCP/IP, ad nauseum.

https://www.ietf.org/

What do you make of WebRTC?

Is that an attempt to do just what you propose?

Yes! A second problem is that not all clients follow the spec. For example, Safari, which has relations with the dog in every respect: http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com/

Thankfully, for those unfortunate enough to be on an iOS device, I'm sure a native app can provide webRTC support rather than going the browser route.

If Safari is an impediment then it's time to put more pressure on Apple to conform. That's a lot easier than inventing new standards.

Mozilla caved on H.264 so anything is possible.

I don't think it's really in Apple's interest to conform. The status quo means developers have to build native apps.

Apple has a vested interest in having a high quality browser. In many "native apps" it's the backbone of them.

What would Twitter be, for example, without a robust WebKit view for web content?

WebRTC doesn't help the user inter operate between different clients (apps, not browsers) That's when we have a true standard.

Right now it's just a platform/API for developers (an achievement nonetheless)

WebRTC can help apps/browsers communicate with each other, but it still relies on out-of-band signaling.

There are plenty of libraries for WebRTC for native apps on iOS, Android, and desktop OSs -- and they all interoperate with the built-in Chrome and Firefox implementations.

However, to set up the calls, you need to get data between those clients, and WebRTC doesn't do that.

What's the solution?

Personally I don't think there is one.

Any such protocol would reduce these apps to a 'lowest common denominator' of features.

And in the current climate, its features (not interoperability) that sells.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one. But I can't see it appearing until the business case demands it.

You're not wrong, but did you read the article? Most of his complaints were around the social and human factors that make remote conferencing terrible. An open RFC standard isn't going to fix that.

I believe the biggest impact to rapport is poor audio, not video.

Even dedicated conferencing rooms have poor quality mic setup (easy to fix) and acoustics (a little harder)

It's testament to the ability of echo cancellation and associated algorithms that these systems are able to make anything work at all -- and in many ways this has masked the problem, preventing attention where it's needed.

I develop a 'conferencing' system for radio broadcasters called cleanfeed.net. It's amazingly basic compared to more general systems, (it basically doesn't do any changes to the audio) and yet the rapport is much greater, even with smart use of basic kit -- you can chat over the top of someone, interject and conversation 'flows'; no video needed.

Of course, this is very much a solution for a certain kind of "advanced" user, but I believe the solution is somewhere in the middle -- too much attention spent on video (not audio) and on software (rather than provisioning the right hardware)

Agreed that quality audio is key. But poor, stuttering video can really be distracting. In Locus we will typically just stop a video stream before allowing the stuttering experience.

I think we're probably agreeing here entirely; no video at all is better than bad video, which is a distraction.

Our brains are familiar with a phone call; it's just not a problem in most cases.

The remaining cases are probably more like meetings with unfamiliar people, or webcam sex chat.

Yeah. I've attempted an experiment that disabled echo cancellation and required everyone to have a dedicated mic and headset. The difference is truly spectacular when people's voices don't cut out due to cancellation or suppression of the audio stream in the service of eliminating feedback.

It's much more like you're in a room with folks.

Unfortunately it's asking a lot of users of traditional video conferencing software that everyone have their own mic and headset -- but it really would be a much better experience.

What a clever way to promote that app.

Instead of making a post about his app like "We made an app that solves X, Y and Z", which probably wouldn't receive much attention, he made a post about the problems instead then casually just mentioned that his app solved the problems.

Smart, I'll probably try that in the future.

Thanks. (we did try the other method too)

The design needs some work though. You can make it much better quickly by a few quick steps:

- Replace the horrible box shadows with one from here: http://cssdeck.com/labs/16-box-shadows-to-save-your-time

- Add box shadows/borders to the square images.

- Think about white space. There's basically no space between the paragraphs, yet huge space between the sections. Why?

- Apply a super slight linear gradient (the two colors should look the same) to the buttons, with perhaps a thin border with a similar color and some slight shadows. The green should be replaced anyway.

- Think about the typography. The general text here seems a little bold, try a font-size of 300.

Those quick tips make most typical "developer designs" much better quickly.

Awesome. Thanks for the specific recommendations! We know we need to get a designer on this soon. But those we can do easily enough.

How many of these are hard technical problems vs. not enough time spent on UX?

At least most of these, with the exception of "connection issues" could be solved with better UX. Is it just a matter of time before the major providers start taking it seriously?

Maybe 50-50? Things like minimizing your own video are certainly not hard technical problems. But some apparently UX issues could become hard tech. For example, analyzing mic signals to detect speech vs. background noise to make the experience more comfortable?

Yeah, and at what point does deeper AI start to play a role? Some people might want google to listen to your conference and play secretary -- following up on action items, suggesting dates for follow-up meetings, etc. Like they've stated doing with Allo?

One issue is that laptop cameras still mostly suck compared to the high quality smartphone cameras that we have grown accustomed to. Video conferencing vendors can either fix that by offering fancy external cameras, which always ends up being expensive, or using some sort of software processing to improve the video quality. (Shameless plug: our browser extension Zombocam kinda does the latter https://www.zombocam.com/ )

One of the main problems I had as a startup founder with getting a good video conference solution for the team was setting up meeting rooms with hardware. There are very few good all-in-one solutions out there and most of the ones that do exists (Lifesize, Cisco, etc.) are really expensive and not a great experience either.

I've been fairly happy with Highfive[1], as they are the closest I've been able to get to "plug-and-play" video conference rooms. And for the most part the usability is good. The biggest problem we had was that the app would not work with some other companies we wanted to connect with because of their firewall settings, however they are now supporting WebRTC which means no app, no special firewall settings for guests in your conference. I have yet to try the new WebRTC stuff but overall I can highly recommend Highfive based on our first few months working with it.

[1]:https://highfive.com/

Were those other companies also using highfive? Or were they using other systems?

Webrtc is sadly not immune to firewall issues, so I'd be curious if that actually solves the issue you experienced.

No they weren't. Mostly financial companies with arcane firewall setups. They usually had opened things up only for more popular conference software like GoToMeeting or Skype, so that is one of the problems faced when using a newer technology even if it is a better experience overall.

Time will tell if WebRTC solves these issues, it was only just launched this week.

God the tools my Fortune 500 clients use for remote collaboration are stuck in 2001. It's so bad.

Core problem is that video conferencing is inherently an unsatisfying, oddly asymmetrical social presentation. On the phone, users can talk, and be present, yet multitask. On a video conference, you have to present (via acting) a presentation of "present thought", which since most systems show you a real time display of your face, quickly becomes a "mirror exercise" more than a conveyance of information.

It's a poor simulacrum of social interaction, a compromise that satisfies no one.

Good point. Any ideas come to mind how to solve this with technology or UX improvements?

This does relate to one of my points in the blog post. The current experience is not conversational, and instead ends up with the speaker "presenting" much more than just talking.

We've addressed "some" of these problems in our new app: Locus (https://inthelocus.com). It's still new and improving, but we'd love any feedback. Thanks!

Btw. we do use WebRTC and it has worked quite nicely for install-free conferencing.

In my 2nd last job we used Skype and it worked flawlessly. In my last job we used google hangouts and it was never perfect and often problematic.

In my last job we used Skype for Business. Worked decently once we got connected. But invariably it would take 10 minutes for everyone to actually get connected with working audio. And actually we typically only used audio, so didn't even have to worry about video troubles. Still it suffered from people entering "presentation mode".

Agreed on Hangouts.

My team just started using biba as we now have a remote employee. It's ridiculously easy to use and also has screen share.

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