What if we made video conferencing work?

The next bit is finding a good UX for doing audio setup. Right now automatic gain control is just broken. The vast majority of problems that people have (after having no audio at all) is that the audio is set up badly. If you want to see how good audio can be in a VOIP situation, take a few minutes setting up mumble properly and talk to someone. It's incredible.

Those 2 things will solve virtually every audio problem because most of the really pathological cases where echo cancellation breaks are initiated by those 2 things. However, for doing video conferencing where you have lots of people, you probably need a hardware solution. This hardware already exists, but it doesn't talk to any voip software that I know about (granted I've been out of the business for a decade). Anybody really serious about this market needs to build hardware (or better yet, pair with someone willing to build commodity hardware to open standards).

Video? It's really no problem. It can lag for seconds and it's totally fine. All of the serious problems are audio.

Who knows, maybe with net neutrality gone ISPs will provide priority traffic so companies can pay more for better video conferencing (whatever better means). And rich people can pay for better Netflix. We can dream and look on the bright side, right? I just hope you aren't a video conferencing startup, because $megacorp already has an exclusive with the ISPs for video conferencing on this priority network...

(On a serious note, I mention this because it's part of the age-old network traffic prioritisation debate, not to start a flame war about net neutrality. That includes the downside of prioritisation, too)

Likewise at Google, Hangouts and self-driving cars won't share any people. Especially as their self-driving cars are now handled by a different company, Waymo, who have the same parent company as Google.

I get the point that it's astonishing that videoconferencing tech is still so awful. I remember interviewing at Google's London office years ago and two of the interviews were done by video links, and they worked flawlessly - but this very impressive conference system was one Google had bought in from somewhere and presumably paid ridiculous sums of money for. That experience gave me hope for consumer video tech - but it's now ten years later and where are we?

FaceTime seems to work, but it only works between Apple devices. Google Duo seems to work in my limited experimentation, but only works between phones running the Duo app, because Google have more hands that don't know what any of the other hands are doing than just about anybody else - especially in the consumer communications arena.

I wish someone would get their pants on and seriously invest in sorting out video calling.

Heck, getting audio to work reliably would be good. Best one for that currently in my experience? Slack.

"Can you imagine the outrage that would occur in Palo Alto California if anybody presumed to keep chickens in their back yards?"

When we lived in Palo Alto (~2008-2011), we had about twenty chickens and three goats. The neighbors all loved them. There are some ways in which Palo Alto is a pretty weird place, but almost all the people there are just like people anywhere else.

It does have an essentially perfect 1Gb/s Internet connection.

This is the current version: http://www.polycom.com/products-services/products-for-micros...

Perhaps someone will invent a one-way transparent display where the camera will look out from behind the middle of the monitor. Alternatively, we could position multiple cameras around the edges of the display and then use real-time video processing software to combine those streams into a single synthetic video which makes it appear as if the person is looking at you.

The author never say exactly what they want fixed, but we sure know most VC systems are a horrible mess. We spend a lot of effort on UX and making good quality calls work through NATs and random packet loss.

The main products are meeting room solutions, which tends to be least well server by free offerings. Squeezing everyone in front of a laptop is never great.

>This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs' high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable.

>The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognmoic Dsyphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking. Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and ‚ thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention.

>It turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person.

>Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markest for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern.

--infinite jest (1996)

I am the founder / CEO of Highfive. One of the companies implicated in Alex's post :-)

I know some in the YC community checked out Highfive early in our maturity curve when we released our product 2 years ago. I would love for folks here to try it out again and tell us what they think.

I took a few minutes to write up a few lessons we have learned over the last 4.5 years. It's definitely been harder than anything I've ever worked on. Would love your thoughts.

https://highfive.com/10-reasons-video-conferencing-still-suc...

I know, I know. Corporations go where the money flows, and they don't want to change the status quo if there's no money in that revolution (case in point: not attacking the rental cars / hotels / airlines). I am well aware.

But the author is still very correct on a conceptual level.

Rather than so many different versions of flawed product. I wonder how things would work out if a lot of creative individuals solved and made better the same problem.

Also, I think another pain point is that webcam and audio setup is tricky to most `windows` pc average user, is there a product that helps figure out the quality score of your setup and potentially help with it ?

Screen sharing on the other hand is great, just about always need that. But we really don't have to be looking at each other constantly.

So stop trying to fix something that is inherently not needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU

You executives can go on and fly, don't ruin work for everybody else.