Back in 2010, Pew Internet Project conducted a study on how many people within the United States had tried using video calls on their computers or mobile devices. Surprisingly, the numbers crunched to roughly 23 percent for Internet users or one out of every five person involved in the study. Going four years in, with the development of more powerful and faster smartphones and tablets, the numbers have skyrocketed. As a matter 
of fact, according to Skype’s yearly statistics, only one million people had ever simultaneously connected through its service in 2004 but by 2013 this had shot all the way up to 70 million people, all making video calls at the very same time.
Just think what this means for your business. In direct relation to this, video conferencing has become mandatory for most businesses today. A report by CDW showed that three of four businesses will turn to video conferencing technology for telecommunication solutions. In 2014, this has turned out to be true as every business, offline and online, now utilizes video conferencing both in-house and towards its customers.
Everything is Going Mobile
With technology rapidly moving forward, it won’t just be enough to have video conferencing functional in your company. Everything is going mobile; this is one reason why innovative systems such as Blue Jeans video conferencing – which uses the Cloud viable for mobile devices instead of hardwired networks – have become a popular hit these days. A recent study conducted by BI Intelligence shows that by the end of 2013, approximately 22 percent of the global populace will have a smartphone while six percent will have a tablet. The same study shows that tablets have a faster adoption rate; this means more and more people are buying tablets than smartphones and other mobile devices.
This information is crucial for a company looking into adopting video conferencing tools. It can be too expensive and too complicated to buy specific hardware and software but with services like Blue Jeans video conferencing – which is entirely cloud-based – you can connect company members and consumers through any given device, no matter where they are on the planet. Gone are the days where a company member needs to have a specific type of computer, with specific software installed, to be wired to a specific network just for them to converse via video chatting and conferencing. All it takes now is to flip a phone or tablet on, connect to the Internet, and communicate visually with anyone within the company.
This also leads to another important innovation in the future: cross-platform video conferencing. Instead of everyone having the same hardware, and wired to the same network, people can now connect even if they are using different devices. While one could use a phone, another member might be on their laptop or tablet. This is crucial for the future since there are more and more variations of existing devices as well as the introduction of new mobile devices every year. Sticking to only one type of hardware is going to cripple a company’s options in telecommunicating, especially when video conferencing is used with consumers who might be using different devices altogether.
More Tools, More Innovation
Just half a decade ago, video conferencing was restricted to a simple interface where the members in the meeting would only see video panels of each other. You couldn’t send chat messages to individual participants, you couldn’t send documents, and you definitely could not stream live video recordings while conducting the video conference. That is all a thing of the past. Looking into the future of video conferencing you will discover that there are now options to record entire video conference meetings and then share those videos while simultaneously conducting another meeting. There are now tools to instantly connect with anyone in the company, to share documents of any file format, and others. With each passing year, video conferencing is bridging the gap of distant communication to the point where you can practically do through video conferencing what you could while meeting in the same room.
Push-notifications, recordings, cloud-network systems, video streaming while video chatting, and individual settings per member of a conference are all standard features of today. By the next few years, companies will turn specifically towards virtual collaboration. This is where members of the video conference can work and communicate together through the same interface. While everyone is viewing each other’s videos, they can still work, send files, and share those files to the whole group while still maintaining their own private workspace. It will be just like managing your own little spot on the meeting table except that the members are telecommunicating.
Pushing into the future of video conferencing is all about going mobile, creating easy access all across the board, and making telecommunicating solutions faster and simpler for all parties involved. Whereas the technology was once a revolutionary option in the past, it has now become a mandatory asset in the future.