The Evolution of the Conference Call
The single most compelling reason to invest in communication technology is to be more productive. No one ever bought a fax machine to save on postage. Email wasn’t designed to save money on paper. Advances in technology for the office have always been about speeding up business.
The history of video conferencing takes us back to the late 1950s — early conference calling technology provided a way to host multiple people on a telephone call. The conference call was great for reducing air travel and speeding up decision making, but it relied entirely on audio and lacked the human element of an in-person meeting. Today, you can see the evolution of the conference call has taken two major forms:
Web Conferencing vs. Video Conferencing
Web Conferencing
On one side, web conferencing takes the traditional conference call and adds a layer of visual enhancement through a shared presentation. This offers meeting attendees the ability to view the same presentation slide deck and helps create the illusion that people dialing in are in the same room.
Video Conferencing
The other enhancements to the conference call came by way of video conferencing. Video technology focuses more on the face-to-face human connection and nonverbal communication to give everyone in the meeting both a voice and a face around the table.
As the evolution continued, we started to see the best aspects of web conferencing merge with the best aspects of video conferencing. Screen sharing was built into video conferencing services. Expensive on-premise infrastructure and telepresence rooms faded out in favor of more scalable, cloud-hosted huddle room solutions. And personal devices like laptops with built-in webcams and smartphones provided an easy way for anyone to join a video call.