Video phones are coming -- honest!

By Richard Morochove

First published June 6, 1996

NEW YORK -- The video phone is here! I think I’ve read those words every couple of years for the past two decades. In fact, I even wrote something to that effect in 1994, and today the video phone remains an expensive gadget in limited use.

I know you’re skeptical about prospects for the video phone. But this skeptic turned into a believer last week at a New York demonstration of Intel’s Video Phone for the Home with ProShare. It’s relatively inexpensive, at $300 or less, and runs on a standard telephone line. The first models will be out later this year and Intel expects to sell millions in 1997.

The catch? The Video Phone needs to plug into a pretty powerful PC - a minimum 133 Mhz. Pentium. The quality of the video picture improves with faster processors. The Pentium encodes the video signal so you can transmit a reasonably good quality signal over nothing more than Plain Old Telephone Service, POTS in telecommunications jargon.

Intel’s market studies show the concept of the Video Phone is very appealing to distributed families. Parents want to both see and talk to children who have moved to attend university or to start a new life thousands of kilometres away.

Intel’s Video Phone for Home is simple to use. You start by placing a regular voice call using Intel’s ProShare software on your PC. The party you’ve called can answer and talk back to you using a standard voice telephone, but video transmission requires a ProShare-equipped PC at the other end.

To start the video part of the call, you click a button on your computer screen. Both computers then go through a handshaking process for about 15 seconds, similar to the mating squeals of two fax machines, before the first video appears.

Audio quality of the Video Phone is superb and the video quality is much better than I expected, running at about 4 to 12 frames per second, depending upon the degree of movement in the image. By comparison, TV transmits at 30 FPS. You can also send a high-resolution snapshot during the video call and save it for future viewing. One-sided video conferencing is also available.

Some camcorders with digital output will be able to plug in to the computer’s Universal Serial Bus (USB), which will eliminate the need to buy a separate digital video camera.

In addition to the Pentium-based computer, the video system requires a video modem compatible with the V.80 communications standard, digital video camera, microphone and Intel ProShare Video Conferencing software. Compaq has already announced that all its new Presario home computers coming out this August will be Intel Video Phone compatible. Compaq will sell a plug-and-play video phone kit that makes it easy to upgrade.

Selected models of IBM’s Aptiva home PC’s will also feature Video Phone compatibility as early as September. Intel has agreements with most other major computer makers and expects that about 15 million of the 20 million home computers sold in 1997 will have this capability.

By the end of 1997, Intel plans to release upgraded software that will support the Video Phone over the Internet. You’ll be able to place a video phone call anywhere in the world that’s hooked up to the Net, at a cost of about 25 cents per hour for Internet access time. What do you think this will do to the long distance revenues of telephone companies?

The Video Phone for the Home is Andy Grove’s sweet revenge against the phone companies. A little over two years ago, Grove announced Intel’s first video phone system, a business version that required a special add-in processing board and an ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) phone line, in addition to a video camera and mike. Despite the cost, which ranged up to $3,000, Intel now has a 42 per cent market share of the ISDN video conferencing market.

Unfortunately, the number of ISDN phone lines is still very small, in comparison to the millions of standard telephone lines. Grove feels the high price and poor availability of ISDN lines have stunted the growth of ProShare. He lays the blame squarely on poor marketing practices of the phone companies.

“If we introduced a Pentium processor with MMX technology, and just as it’s about to take off at the $3,000 price point we moved to $6,000 ... you’d be wondering whatever happened to MMX technology,” said Grove. “ISDN is a technical solution that’s ready for mass deployment. I see absolutely no earthly reason for the existence of POTS today.” CW