Good day and happy Wednesday! We are back today with another #trending in video blog courtesy of your friends here at Best Made Videos®. We are still thick in the COVID-19 pandemic but that won’t stop us from bringing you the latest trends and tips in the world of videography, video production and more.
Today we have a “fun” little article from our friends over at www.fortune.com talking all about video conferencing in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. The title of this article is “Former Cisco CEO John Chambers finally gets his wish: Video conferencing is now mainstream,” which is an interesting thought to have. In the world of ever-changing times and people using all sorts of various technologies to stay connected across the internet, the rise of the video conferencing service, specially Zoom and Skype to be sure, has been one of the major stories to track over these last few weeks.
Joh Chambers, the article starts, was always on the look out for innovations that would be way ahead of the currently technology trends. The former Cisco CEO retired in 2017 (after a long 20 year career) bet early on that internet enabled video would become as indispensable as the telephone as a primary mode of communication.
“Chambers made his first big push in the then-nascent market years before the current COVID-19 crisis forced many of us to adopt video conferencing for everything from yoga classes to corporate board meetings.” In 2006 Chamber launched a super high priced video conferencing system called Telepresence, which was specifically designed for enterprises with lots of cash on hand. In the years that followed, Chamber led him team to invest billions in the video communications space, by acquiring Webex in 2007 and the Flip mini video camcorder in 2009 (they killed that project off just two years later). Cisco even launched their own “personal” video telepresence device called Umi in 2010.
Although not all of his endeavors in the video communications space were successful, Chambers continued to push through. Some of the video services were just too costly to become widely used and to be fair Cisco’s strengths have never really been in the consumer space. Chambers now runs his own venture capital firm but still keeps his eyes on the huge steps he made while at the helm at Cisco.
Webex now provides screen sharing and video conferencing tools for businesses and hit a record number of users in the month of March (to the tune of 324 million) while Zoom (which was founded by a former Webex engineer) hit 300 million DAILY users in the same time frame.
Well that does it for today! Thanks for taking the time to relieve a little bit of history with us today on our #trending in video blog. We hope you learned a thing or two about some of the history behind the rise of video telecommunications services which had arrived in a huge way here in the early stages of 2020. It will be curious to see if they continue their exponential growth once COVID-19 has subsided, or if people will return to more face-to-face communications once they are able to go outside again. Thanks for reading!!