Comment by tenpoundhammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tenpoundhammer | Hacker News Reader

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I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up exponentially. We found that most people want quality in the 95th percentile but want to pay for the 70th percentile... There will need to be some serious cost reductions, integrations, and improvements on the hardware and video encoding side before enterprise video conferencing meets the quality and price expectations that customers want.

Also important, most video conferencing solutions suffer from the same problems because they all use the same hardware just with a different software layer written on top of it. There are very few providers of video encoding and processing hardware.

So what are the strong solutions? Every high end conference room AV system I've ever seen was total garbage from a UX perspective.

If you are only looking for UX vidyo has a decent product, Microsoft's latest enterprise offering is good, HPs halo now owned by polycom is good, polycom has some cutting edge stuff that is good but very expensive.

But it's important to remember that UX is only about a quarter of the total experience.

If the UX is so bad that people can't make it work and have to resort to putting someone's laptop at one end of the conference table instead of using the conference room AV, then it doesn't matter how good the other three quarters of your system is.

Many value UX higher than that, but even for those who don't, 25% is still a whole heck of a lot.

I simply don't believe this. The cost to develop a system that isn't a horribly complex, unintuitive UX disaster is that much more expensive? We aren't talking about amazing AV quality with lag, we're talking about a system that doesn't take 15 minutes out of a meeting to get working.

Gimme your specs, I'm curious to know what meeting infrastructure you're using. I can start a vidyo meeting in about 15 seconds.

There are a lot of reasons for horrible complexity.... 1. There are many ways to roll out a video conferencing system because the hardware is all commodity. Many companies will have their IT department buy all the hardware and try to deploy it using the built in methodologies for connecting conference rooms. This is usually when everyone is given a 16 digit pin number to dial into a room, this causes the dial in nightmares. There are also 3rd parties that will basically sell the same solution as the "custom IT solution" as a service. 2. If you want a decent UI experience you move from snapping commodity hardware together to building a software engineering team, software release pipeline, software updates, and all the stuff that comes along with it. This is usually done by a third party but it still costs more than the commodity solution which it is priced against 3. Once you get a software engineering team involved they have to support the different types of hardware out in production. Most companies have generations of conferencing hardware installed with different configurations throughout the company and do not want to pay for all new hardware. Now your software has to be able to implement screen sharing with 5 different codecs and all those codecs have different bugs and different communication protocols. 4. HP tried to solve this by building their own codecs and forcing all rooms to deploy with the same configurations, but this ended up being the most expensive video conferencing system in the world. It also had the best quality and best reliability.

So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.

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