Saturday, April 7, 2007

Impact on the general public

High speed Internet connectivity has become more widely available at a reasonable cost and the cost of video capture and display technology has decreased. Consequently personal video teleconference systems based on a webcam, personal computer system, software compression and broadband Internet connectivity have become affordable for the general public. Also, the hardware used for this technology has continued to improve in quality, and prices have dropped dramatically. The availability of free software (often as part of chat programs such as Windows Live Messenger) has made software based videoconferencing accessible to many.

For many years, futurists have envisioned a future where telephone conversations will take place as actual face-to-face encounters with video as well as audio. Desktop PC videoconferencing promises to make this a reality, although it remains to be seen whether there is widespread enthusiasm for video calling.

No comments: