Tim McElligott Blog: The Universal Language of Video

It dawned on me last night as I watched – in real time – the video of miner Luis Urzua step into the rescue capsule more than 2,000 feet below the surface of the earth in the remote Atacama desert in Chile that everything I had heard that very afternoon at the VoIP Conference at IIT near Chicago was wrong.

Not technically. The various engineers were right on the button as they dissected the complex quality problems that keep video from replacing voice as the “v" of VoIP, especially in mobile services. Compression, encoding, storage, latency, processing power, protocols and other factors all have a part to play in the slow slog of adoption in video prior to the iPhone.

Even since then, quality remains subpar. Yet despite being a low-quality product relative to what communications engineers are used to delivering, mobile and other broadband video is enjoying a surprising surge in popularity.

The Chilean miner rescue shows one reason why. Every once in a while a video speaks for itself. The drama coming from the Chilean desert was palpable. That it was captured thousands of feet underground in a remote desert in South America and broadcast in real time around the world is, unfortunately, ho-hum to the public already. Engineers have done their jobs too well and people are no longer surprised. But that the video was jumpy and a little blurry mattered not one bit — to anyone. Nobody was thinking how good it might have looked using H.265. They were just happy to be watching that video.

In this case, the quality was in the content and had little to do with the network or the device. Not all video will be as compelling, so network-derived quality is still extremely important. But sharing moments like this around the world in a language the whole world understands is more important.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.