Ten More Years of Business Travel. Sorry.

That's right—he said he was losing sleep over videoconferencing! His fear was that videoconferencing technology would become so good that businesspeople would use it for virtual meetings instead of flying to attend those meetings in person. He explained to me that for airlines, the real profits come from business customers, and losing even 4 or 5 percent of these frequent flyers would have a big impact on the airlines' bottom lines.

The actual capabilities of videoconferencing technology certainly didn't warrant that much anxiety from airlines a decade ago. While the idea of videoconferencing has always had a whiz-bang appeal, the actual experience of setting up and using even the best-of-class videoconferencing systems didn't really address what people wanted or expected. The technology back then was mediocre at best, with expensive, clunky equipment and interfaces.

I thought of my decade-old conversation with the far-sighted airline exec last week as I was traveling back from Europe, a journey that involved the usual drudgery, security hassles, delays, and pain of traveling. I always enjoy visiting world-class cities to speak or conduct business meetings, but the allure of travel is long gone. I would have loved to give a speech or hold a meeting via videoconferencing and do away with the travel altogether.

But, alas, even ten years later, I don't think the airlines need to worry about having videoconferencing cut into their business-traveler bread and butter—just yet. Except for a couple of very high-end solutions, videoconferencing that replicates the look and feel of a real meeting is perhaps another ten years out.

One of the high-end exceptions is the Halo videoconferencing system that Hewlett-Packard offers its corporate customers. I have used it on several occasions to "meet" in San Jose with HP people in other parts of the world, and it's amazing—as close as you can get to sitting across the table from someone who may be thousands of miles away.—next: A Complete Media Room >

A Complete Media Room

Halo is actually a complete media room: You sit at a table with individual microphones at each seat, facing an entire wall of screens that are focused on another Halo room somewhere else. The cameras have wide angles and can see everyone at each table, and you really feel like you are in a conference room with these people. The effect can be somewhat eerie, but only because it's such a good approximation of a regular meeting. The big issue with Halo is cost: You pay $500,000 for the setup and at least $20,000 per month just in maintenance. And that doesn't count the telecom charges for the actual video relays. But HP's Halo is the gold standard at the moment, perfect for those businesses that can afford it.

There are, of course, lower-cost videoconferencing systems from companies such as Polycom, and most of the major telecom vendors offer a videoconferencing solution of their own. At the same time, some of the PC-based video-telephony programs have improved enough to be used for small-business meetings. Apple's new iChat video-telephony program, which comes with the new Leopard OS X, makes videoconferencing with three people easy; depending on the speed of your connection, the experience is actually pretty good. I was recently in a game engineering lab in which the workers constantly used iChat to speak with company programmers in India and China. And let's not forget low-cost collaboration tools out there such as WebEx, which let users hold virtual meetings.

But even with these lower-cost solutions available, no noticeable decline in business air travel can yet be attributed to a broader use of videoconferencing. Before the airlines see any real impact, I believe a solution with the quality and experience of HP's Halo will need to be 10 to 20 times cheaper and perhaps even portable. It will need to be accessible in multiple conference rooms and be as easy to set up as a video projector is today. While the day will come when this happens, I don't expect it anytime in the next ten years.

I am hopeful, however, that an improved videoconferencing technology will someday give us real alternatives to heading off to SFO or JFK just to do the next meeting

Source: www.yahoo.biz.com