Video Conferencing Market Trends

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Video Conferencing
Market Trends

by Geoff Keston

Docid: 00018714

Publication Date: 2204

Report Type: MARKET

Preview

Video conferencing – also know as web conferencing, virtual meetings, and
video meetings – is a hardware, software, and services offering that
permits two or more individuals to communicate via video and audio over
the Internet. A popular enterprise tool enabling webinars and
long-distance meetings as well as remote attendance at seminars and
conferences, video conferencing was instrumental in allowing enterprise
employees (in particular, knowledge workers) to abandon their offices
during the COVID-19 pandemic and work from their homes or other remote
locations, thus mitigating the economic damage caused by the outbreak.

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Technology Tutorial

A popular enterprise tool enabling webinars and long-distance meetings
as well as remote attendance at seminars and conferences, video
conferencing was instrumental in allowing enterprise employees (in
particular, knowledge workers) to abandon their offices during the
COVID-19 pandemic and work from their homes or other remote locations,
thus mitigating the economic damage caused by the outbreak.

The trend toward remote work remains
persistent, thus the trend toward the development and deployment of new
and improved video conferencing systems remains similarly persistent.

Figure 1. A Typical Video Conferencing Call

Source: Pixabay

The video conferencing industry, which is led by providers like Zoom (a
pandemic phenomenon), Cisco, and Microsoft, is positioned to continue its
rapid growth, providing opportunities for producers of VC solutions,
platforms, cameras, speakers, phone systems, computers, mobile devices,
and services.

Market Dynamics

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Primary Applications

There are three primary applications for video conferencing:

Meetings – Two or more people conduct a meeting over
the Internet, conversing and sharing documents.
Presentations – Attendees log into a video conference
where a presenter displays information using various techniques such as
audio and/or video streaming.
Collaboration – Workers in remote locations
simultaneously develop and revise business documents.

Reduced Costs

Video conferencing is becoming more popular with enterprise CFOs because
it reduces:

Travel expenditures, and
In a era of remote working, enables the consolidation of high-cost
office space.¹

Reduced Maintenance

Today’s cloud-based video conferencing systems are gaining market share
because they are both feature-filled and, perhaps just as importantly,
easy to maintain – in fact, they’re maintained by the cloud vendor –
meaning that enterprises need only pay monthly subscription fees to enjoy
functional and reliable video connections.

Security Concerns

While easy-to-use video conferencing systems have accelerated the
acceptance of remote services, particularly telehealth, consumers,
particularly patients, are concerned about the security of personally
identifiable information (PII). For their part, enterprises are concerned
about potential violations of relevant security and privacy standards,
especially, the:

US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

Ease-of-Use Focus

According to analyst Slava Vaniukov, “Customers pay attention to the
convenience and simplicity of video conferencing apps. Therefore, users
prefer to use applications such as FaceTime and WhatsApp to start a
conversation in seconds.”²

Fully appreciating this dynamic, video conferencing vendors are
concentrating on improved function, performance, and ease-of-use
as a formula for promoting their solutions.

Market Leaders

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According to Research and Markets, the global video conferencing market is
expected to reach $9.95 billion by 2028, reflecting a compound annual growth
rate (CAGR) of 11.4 percent between 2021 and 2028.³

Among many contenders, there are three prominent players in today’s video
conferencing market: Zoom, Cisco Webex, and Microsoft Teams.

Zoom

A breakout provider favored by pandemic audiences, Zoom offers:

High-definition video and audio with support for up to 1000 video
participants and 49 videos on screen.
The ability for multiple participants to share their screens
simultaneously and co-annotate their presentations for greater
interactivity.
The capacity for meetings to be recorded locally or to the cloud,
complete with searchable transcripts.

Cisco Webex Meetings

Part of the Cisco Webex family, Meetings:

Provides real-time translation and closed captioning, instantly
translating a meeting into 100+ languages from 13+ spoken languages.
Encourages employee engagement by enabling non-verbal reactions with
gesture recognition, and offers participant feedback with live polling
and Q&A.
Allows digital whiteboarding for co-creation and collaboration
purposes.

Microsoft Teams Essentials

Designed specifically for small businesses and part of the Microsoft
Teams family, Teams Essentials provides facilities for hosting
professional meetings and collaborations with:

Unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours.
Meetings with up to 300 people.
Ten (10) gigabytes of cloud storage per user.

Market Trends

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The Remote Workforce

The jury is in. For today’s “knowledge worker,” basically, anyone who
works primarily with a computer, the era of remote work, aka telecommuting
or telework, has arrived. Enabled by decades of technological innovations
– from portable dial-up computer terminals, fax machines, and personal
computers to the Internet, smartphones, and the cloud – today’s global
information infrastructure allows millions of employees to work full-time
(remote work) or part-time (hybrid work) from their home or other
non-enterprise location.

Whether remote or hybrid, today’s workforce needs will continue to drive
innovation in the video conferencing market, enabling simpler, speedier,
and safer connections between enterprise professionals.

Home Office Upgrades

Analyst David Maldow reports that the COVID-19 pandemic “changed
priorities regarding visual and audio quality. After
a year of bad camera angles, poor lighting and just looking unattractive
compared to people with better setups, home workers began to demand
better. Fortunately, some employers understood the need for people to look
and sound good while working remotely and provided workers a stipend to
upgrade their home setup.

“Video vendors are jumping on the home office upgrade trend by offering
kits and bundles for home workers – generally, a webcam and headset – as
well as new offerings of higher-quality webcams for those in client-facing
positions who need to make a good impression over video.”⁴

Live Video Editing

In another advance designed to improve the meeting experience, Maldow
also reveals that “New streaming software has been developed to offer live
video editing, which creates post-production effects during a live video
call. These post-production effects range from changing backgrounds to
advanced camera effects and tricks.

“Several vendors, like Zoom, already offer features that support green
screen and virtual backgrounds and are actively adding more.”⁵

Telehealth Is Booming

Rendered essential by the COVID-19 pandemic, and made possible by video
conferencing technology, telehealth or telemedicine is rapidly becoming a
standard healthcare offering, improving outcomes for patients living in
rural areas or patients without ready access to affordable transportation.

While the absence of doctor-patient physical contact can complicate
diagnoses, video-based telehealth services will continue to proliferate as
long as video vendors can successfully attend to systems vulnerable to
cyber infections. Ironically, video vendors must practice preventive
technology health to enable physicians to practice preventive people
health.

Figure 2. Telehealth Calls Are Extending Physicians’ and Patients’ Healthcare Reach

Figure 2. Telehealth Calls Are Extending Physicians' and Patients' Healthcare Reach

Source: Pixabay

Cloud and VCaaS

According to Research and Markets, “The increasing transition towards
cloud and the growing adoption of Video Conferencing as a Service (VCaaS)
are expected to drive market growth. As remote and globalized working
models are becoming popular, the move to the cloud is becoming inevitable,
thereby driving the demand for video conferencing solutions.”⁶

Sales and Marketing

Analyst Slava Vaniukov predicts that “Video conferencing innovations will
continue to affect the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Dedicated
apps can be used to walk users through purchases involving real estate,
furniture, vehicles, and many other products.”⁷

AI and 5G

Not surprisingly, both AI and 5G technology will influence the
development of video conferencing.

As analyst Irwin Lazar reports, “AI’s ability to provide usage analytics,
as well as improve meeting experiences, increases the potential for
realized cost savings, revenue enhancements and productivity gains by
making meetings more intuitive, optimizing use of meeting space, improving
in-meeting experience, and ensuring the follow-on action items are
accurately captured and distributed to meeting participants.”⁸

In terms of 5G, the fifth generation of cellular data technology, will
greatly improve video and audio transmission by providing higher data
speeds, lower latency, increased network capacity, and a more uniform user
experience.

Strategic Planning Implications

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For those enterprises contemplating the introduction or expansion of
video conferencing capabilities, these issues must be considered.

Performance, Reliability, and Security

As with any Internet-based service, video conferencing is subject to
occasional disruptions, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS)
attacks. Prolonged outages or outages occurring at inopportune times
may adversely affect productivity or delay critical deadlines. When using
a video conferencing provider, look for redundancy and fail-safe
guarantees.

Security is also an important factor. It is no longer possible to ignore
the strong possibility of a system being hacked, and the more central
video conferencing becomes to an enterprise, the greater the possibility
that important information may be compromised by an unauthorized
intrusion.

Technological Maturation and Future Directions

Video conferencing technology is much more mature than it was just a few
years ago. It performs (fairly) reliably and with good enough quality for
many personal, business, and educational purposes. And many conferencing
platforms offer additional features such as cloud storage and integration
with social media sites.⁹

But development work remains. For example, today’s services are not at
all interoperable.¹⁰ And if many more employees work from home
permanently and remote education remains popular into the future,
conferencing tools will likely need to improve and expand in a variety of
ways to better match the flexibility and naturalness of in-person
interaction.

References

¹ Slava Vaniukov. “8 Video Conferencing Trends in 2022 in the
Post-COVID World.” Softermii Inc., January 21, 2022.

² Ibid.

³ “Global Video Conferencing Market Size, Share & Trends
Analysis Report by Component (Hardware, Software, Service), by Deployment,
by Enterprise Size, by Application, by End Use, by Region, and Segment
Forecast, 2021-2028.” Research and Markets. 2022.

⁴ David Maldow. “5 Video Conferencing Trends to Eye for 2022." TechTarget. January 25, 2022.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ “Global Video Conferencing Market Size, Share & Trends
Analysis Report by Component (Hardware, Software, Service), by Deployment,
by Enterprise Size, by Application, by End Use, by Region, and Segment
Forecast, 2021-2028.” Research and Markets. 2022.

⁷ Slava Vaniukov. “8 Video Conferencing Trends in 2022 in the
Post-COVID World.” Softermii Inc., January 21, 2022.

⁸ Irwin Lazar. “AI in Video Conferencing Opens a World of
Features.” TechTarget. July 27, 2021.

⁹ Daniel Brame. “The Best Video Conferencing Software for
2021.” PCMag. March 23, 2021.

¹⁰ Ibid.

Web Links

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About the Author

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Geoff Keston is the author of more than 250 articles
that help organizations find opportunities in business trends and
technology. He also works directly with clients to develop communications
strategies that improve processes and customer relationships. Mr. Keston
has worked as a project manager for a major technology consulting and
services company and is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and a
Certified Novell Administrator.

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