You'd think that not being able to fly to meetings across Europe the past week would have given the webconferencing and telepresence industry a big boost. But although there has, out of necessity, been an increase in remote meetings, there's no evidence as yet of any big surge in long-term adoption as an alternative to in-person meetings. Some will say that's a shame, both for the industry and for the carbon footprint of the international business community.
Cost and unfamiliarity are both obstacles. The lifelike experience of high-end telepresence systems doesn't come cheap. Systems that cost less offer a less of an immersive experience and take more getting used to — not simply setting up and operating the technology, but also coping with the behavioural adjustment that's needed to make the meetings productive.
European ministers experienced some of these obstacles at first hand in two high-level meetings that took place over video links after travel had been ruled out.
On Monday, Europe's transport ministers met by videoconference to discuss responses to the continuing no-fly crisis. It had taken five days of crisis before the meeting even took place, and with 27 of them on the call, it must have been an unwieldy event to manage. Nor, to be honest, would it have best served the interests of their client industries to have demonstrated the efficacy of videoconference meetings, since if business people were to discover they no longer need to travel to face-to-face meetings, the airlines would lose even more revenues.
You might have expected telecommunications ministers would have taken a more positive attitude to teleconferencing, but not a bit of it. Unable to attend a planned meeting in Granada to adopt a declaration on a new European digital strategy, one minister tweeted her objection to a proposal to hold the meeting by videoconference instead, IDG reported.
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, French secretary of state for strategic analysis and the development of the digital economy, argued that since the switch to videoconferencing hadn't been planned in advance, some participants would use it as an argument to reject the basis for the discussions.
But a spokesman for Neelie Kroes, the European Commission's vice president for the digital agenda, told IDG that, "If the EU finance ministers were able to agree on a €30 billion ($40 billion) bailout for Greece via a videoconference, it should work for the telecom ministers."
It seems some people simply aren't yet ready for remote conferencing. But as more and more Web users get used to communicating across distance by Skype, Adobe Connect and other low-cost digital messaging platforms, gradually habits will change and it will become increasingly commonplace to forgo travel in favor of the convenience and speed of telepresence. Meanwhile, moves by Cisco to open source some of its telepresence technologies may help with the cost barriers to high-end videoconferencing.
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