The Next Big Thing: Video Conferencing I've been thinking a lot about the state of video conferencing lately. In fact, this has been on my mind for about 15 years, ever since I sat next to a senior executive at a major airline on a cross-country flight in 1995. I asked him a question I often ask leaders I meet when I try to get a sense of what motivates them. I asked him “what keeps him up at night.” His answer was “videoconferencing”. He said that as video conferencing or video telephony became more common, he feared it could have a major impact on airlines. He said businesspeople may eventually choose to hold their meetings via video and not hit the road for internal company meetings or go to client meetings at their location. He feared that videoconferencing would ultimately reduce business travel significantly if that happened. Video telephony has been the next big thing for decades. The concept was first introduced to the world at the New York World's Fair in the early 1960s by AT&T. And every decade since then, major attempts have been made to try to bring video telephony to the point where it could become part of the normal fabric of personal communications. But the obstacles were enormous. In addition to being quite expensive (Cisco telepresence rooms cost between $300,000 and $500,000 per site), high-speed networks simply have not been put in place to offer quality video telephony to the general public. price, they still cost between $10,000 and $50,000 per location, plus bandwidth fees, making them relatively expensive for most businesses to deploy. But I feel like after 50 years of trying to make video telephony a reality that everyone can use, there are some bright spots in the middle of paper......since it was born. In fact, the other day I called her on a regular phone and she asked me why I wasn't using video and told me my call was old fashioned. His generation and today's teens often use tools like Skype video and many other simple video services and for them it's the norm. And with features like Facetime time built into smartphones, this generation will quickly integrate video calls into their mainstream world. But I believe we're closer to seeing AT&T's vision of the World's Fair finally realized. The technology is finally close enough to make a video call almost anytime and anywhere. For me, the only big question is will my generation or my son's generation embrace it and make it a normal part of how we communicate, or will it take millennials and even younger generations to that this becomes widespread..