“Don’t interrupt someone on a video conference” — you never know if they’re going to get called out by their boss.
Author/Coco Liang
Planning/Ant Bao&Coco Liang
Beijing has had so much snow this year that it has weighed down tree branches, covered streets and framed Windows into pictures. With this view, one video conference after another, one newsletter after another, the LiveVideoStack team (and maybe you, too) will be back online for their third week in the middle of February.
If there’s one thing you’ve learned during your telecommuting days, it’s that you should never underestimate a video conference, let alone bother someone who’s doing it.
Many netizens shared their own experiences of video-conferencing at home during the holidays: children’s cries, parents’ greetings and the epidemic news on TV are the background music of video-conferencing forever; The area captured by the computer’s camera is the only visible corner of the house; “Network card” is a common reason for video conferencing, and you can change the platform and network environment every minute. (I don’t know if 5G will work well after the popularization of 5G.)
According to LiveVideoStack, in order to help users solve the above problems, simply put, noise treatment, background blur and delay, less lag, the major video conferencing platform is working overtime to expand, maintain and upgrade the system. All of these are not accomplished overnight. Please pay attention to the follow-up reports of our special planning for the technical interpretation of specific issues. Today, I would like to share with you some of our findings and thoughts in the process of interview and data collection.
“Allowing access to the camera” is the greatest courage
Because they work at home, few students are willing to dress up for the 45-minute morning meeting, but in order to show their serious and responsible attitude to the boss, some students compromise the result is that the upper half of the suit, slippers pants.
According to pulse’s recent “State of the Workforce Survey,” only 0.75 percent of workers sit in front of a computer with elaborate makeup while working remotely. And 66 percent of workers opt for a home-based look.
Choice is choice. The body is honest. According to the usage data from 1st to 7th of this month, Tencent Conference found that 55% of users have enabled the beauty function in online meetings, with the male and female percentages being 45.29% and 54.71% respectively.
In our interviews, we found that business leaders believe that visible communication is more efficient and conducive to decision-making and task assignment than written and spoken communication. But in serious video conferencing like this, beauty features are frowned upon. “Shallow” is the word used by one connected finance executive to express his opinion on the appearance of beauty features in videoconferencing.
The video definition of video conference depends on the suitability of bit rate and resolution, video compression and coding, hardware equipment and network transmission conditions. The future will see specific applications in 4K, AI and VR technologies. The super resolution of Sonnet based on AI algorithm was commercialized at the end of last year.
But at the same time, Gao Zehua, VP of Agora technology, said in an interview that due to the processing capacity of the client encoder, no matter in TV, VR or 4K interaction, it is still relatively far away at present.
Not the future, the present!
Owl LABS described telecommuting as “isn’t the future of work — it’s the present” in a 2019 report. The same can be said for videoconferencing as an integral part of telecommuting.
Apart from the “tuyere theory” that has been hotly discussed in the capital market recently, the above argument is also true based on the data of 2019, regardless of the epidemic.
Fortune 1000 companies are massively resizing their office space based on the fact that employees are already on the move. Studies have repeatedly shown that these companies’ physical offices are empty for 50-60% of the year, as fewer and fewer employees actually show up.
In 2019, 16% of global businesses were fully telecommuting, also according to Owl LABS; Forty percent of businesses are semi-remote. Meanwhile, globally, 52 percent of workers telecommute at least once a week; 68% of employees telecommute at least once a month; And 18% of employees are purely telecommuting.
The main reason employees work from home is for better focus and productivity, followed by a desire to reduce commuting. Surveys show that people who telecommute at least once a month are happier and more productive than those who don’t or don’t telecommute. Companies that allow remote work have 25 percent less turnover than those that don’t.
In addition to productivity and employee retention concerns, cost savings have been an important reason for the rapid adoption of video conferencing in recent years. With rents and real estate prices skyrocketing in San Francisco, Twitter recently started promoting telecommuting for some of its employees.
More interestingly, 69 percent of millennials would even be willing to trade other workplace perks for flexible workspace choices. Research by the International Workplace Group (IWG) found that millennials and Gen Z in the US have been transitioning toward video conferencing entirely instead of face-to-face communication, and among IWG respondents, Twenty-five percent of employees between the ages of 18 and 29 say they use video conferencing to work daily, compared with just 15 percent of 45 – to 60-year-olds.
It is true that the video conferencing market in the United States is more mature than that in China, but the data in recent years also show that the scale of the video conferencing market in China is steadily expanding. According to Frost&Sullivan statistics, China’s video conferencing market grew at a compound annual growth rate of 28.28% from 2014 to 2017, and is expected to reach 44.57 billion yuan in 2022.
In a 2015 Stanford University study in China, a travel agency call center worker (Chinese) who worked from home for nine months improved performance by 13 percent.
Now, the sudden outbreak of the virus has increased the visibility of video conferencing platforms and brought them more users. To retain these users, companies are turning on free services for a limited time to speed up habit building. Take WeLink, a unit of Huawei Cloud, for example. WeLink added 5,000 enterprise users on the day it announced it was free.
Gao described his change of mood over the past week as “hope” and “calm” and said he believes “as the epidemic passes, people will begin to value the necessity and convenience of online communication. We should usher in a new era of real-time interaction, “and that new era needs to be created from now on.
Infinite distance, countless people, are related to me
In times of emergency, videoconferencing connects not just employees who need offices, but students who need classes, patients who need medical attention, and you, me, and him who need facts.
Lu Xun worried about the world with cloth. Two months before his death, he wrote “Infinite distance, countless people, are related to me”. At that time, the development of science and technology could not lead the public to truly see infinite distance and countless people. In today’s era of mobile Internet, video conferencing technology connects people more closely than ever before through high-quality real-time audio transmission. Not only we as individuals, but also the huge companies behind the platform pay attention to “distant places” and “people”.
Since the outbreak, major video conferencing platforms have sprung into action to provide free resources and technical support for emergency relief projects related to the epidemic.
Dingding offers free “online classes”, with an estimated 50 million students learning through dingding online classes. Wechat of the enterprise has developed a collection form, online consultation, COVID-19 zone and other capabilities. Feishu provides free commercial edition services to hospitals, schools and public welfare organizations in Hubei province for 3 years. Xiaoyu Yilian provides free 100 square cloud video conferences to government agencies and medical institutions across the country; The volunteer team of Ukede even developed an entire mask reservation system for people in Zhejiang in just three days… There are many, many teams and businesses that we haven’t listed, that are rescuing and doing.
After the epidemic, we may go back to our normal lives with accumulated fatigue and frustration. Or we could start new lives with greater empathy and a greater appreciation for the present. Maybe we’ll get so used to the convenience and efficiency of video conferencing that we can turn off our beauty filters while turning on the camera. By then, video conferencing systems had been rapidly iterated, noise was effectively blocked, backgrounds were accurately blurred, and audio and video synced without delay.
At that moment, you will not feel noisy, at that moment, our joys and sorrows will be interlinked.
References:
- http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202002141383304367.html
- http://stock.eastmoney.com/a/202002101377949939.html
- https://www.geekpark.net/news/255314
- https://www.geekpark.net/news/255076
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-zoom-wechat-conferencing-overwhelm-networks/
- https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf
- https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics
- https://www.owllabs.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
- https://www.lifesize.com/en/company/news/press-releases/2019/impact-video-conferencing-report
- https://www.fundera.com/resources/working-from-home-statistics