Before March 2020, the videoconferencing industry was a mix of services and team collaboration tools that had respectable enterprise participation and modest consumer usage.

But in what may well represent one of the fastest technology pivots of the modern era, videoconferencing has become an essential, daily communications tool, connecting global businesses, families, the legal system and even the queen of England.

The result has been the kind of exploding user growth that only a select few companies ever experience. Zoom Inc. went from 10 million daily participants in the end of December 2019 to 200 million last March to an estimated 300 million by October. Practically overnight, Zoom became worth more than the world’s seven largest airlines combined.

Microsoft Teams saw an increase of 53% to 115 million users from March to October and, at one point, Google LLC’s video conferencing product was adding 3 million users per day.

“A lot of these companies are printing money,” Jim Lundy, chief executive officer and lead analyst at Aragon Research, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “No one knew who Zoom was in 2015. It really took the COVID crisis to get enough people.”

Dealing with massive growth

With global spending on videoconferencing chugging quietly along at $3 billion in 2018, rising to $6 billion a year later, the hundreds of millions of users who suddenly jumped onto video conferencing platforms in 2020 were like a crowd forced into a half-empty hotel during an unforeseen catastrophe. Both were unprepared.

Issues with security, poor video quality, audio glitches and clunky software interfaces reflected what can happen when user needs suddenly skyrocket in an industry that, seemingly overnight, had to meet dramatically greater demand.

Nearly a year later, that scenario has changed. The videoconferencing industry’s major players have moved quickly to update product offerings, add new features, increase the number of participants per session and capitalize on advances in key areas such as artificial intelligence.

“A lot more people are going to work remotely than they used to,” Will Moxley, senior vice president and chief product officer of RingCentral Inc., said in an interview. “We don’t say we’re a work-from-home company. We’re a work-from-anyplace company.”

A key element of being able to work from anywhere is the ease of the videoconferencing interface. For some of the practitioners in the market, this means using Web Real-Time Communication or WebRTC, an open-source project that allows audio and video communication to work inside of web browsers. WebRTC enables users to communicate via the web without any core applications or plugins.

“That’s one of the big trends in video meetings,” Moxley said. “It’s secure because it’s in the browser. I think everyone is going to have to get on that bandwagon.”

Embracing AI solutions

Another area that’s drawing interest from videoconferencing companies is the use of AI solutions. In December, Cisco Systems Inc. introduced a number of enhancements for its Webex video service, including searchable transcripts, closed captioning, noise cancellation and verbal commands to highlight action items. Cisco also announced plans to roll out AI-based translation of hand gestures such as a “thumbs up.”

“We’re shifting to intelligent video meetings versus regular video meetings,” Lundy noted.

The major platform providers have been tweaking video conference tools in other ways both to accommodate use of the technology for large group meetings and to recognize that people are connecting now from a wide range of locations.

In the middle of last year, Microsoft Corp. launched a “Together Mode” feature that moved meeting participants from a set of isolated talking-head boxes on separate screens into a virtual “room” setting, giving the illusion that everyone was seated together in one space. In December, RingCentral introduced Glip, which can accommodate video meetings lasting 24 hours for up to 100 participants.

And Zoom, early in the pandemic crisis last year, introduced the virtual background, a feature that users found more appealing than the clutter of their living room or kitchen.

“It became more personal, it enables richer communications and the applications now allow users more control and privacy,” Dave Michels, principal analyst and founder of TalkingPointz, said in an interview. “People would keep their cameras off before the pandemic, but now they are usually on — all parties seem to expect it now. Video has become normal as a byproduct of the pandemic.”

Transcripts, clever backgrounds and virtual meeting spaces are nice, but if the picture quality is poor, the videoconferencing experience can go south in a hurry. One of the chip industry’s biggest players has partnered with Avaya Inc. to address this issue.

In October, Nvidia Corp. introduced Maxine, a cloud-based AI solution that reduced video bandwidth consumption by 90%. Nvidia’s Maxine video enhancement offering has been integrated into Avaya Spaces, producing a remarkably rich visual image, according to Aragon’s Lundy.

“What Maxine does is smooth out the quality,” Lundy said. “It’s a video compression technology that’s been used in gaming. You’re going to see better quality as more people adopt Maxine.”

It took a global pandemic for videoconferencing technology to become truly mainstream, but the presence of significant tech players such as Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and Cisco, along with key providers such as RingCentral, Zoom and Avaya, will ensure a highly competitive market for the time being. That will encourage faster advances in technology as well, a process that has been decades in the making.

“For the last 30 years, the videoconferencing industry has been trying to get to parity with in-person interactions.” Michels said. “The technology has become more intuitive and accessible, and will become preferred for many types of interactions.”

Image: Microsoft