Videoconferencing is OK, but it is still common to have issues with it. Bad image quality, setup by lowest common denominator etc. Often you use that 15 minutes just by trying to make it work properly.
My neighbor owns a consultancy. They’ve started shipping the Meeting Owl camera to their bigger clients to improve their meeting experience. It’s has a 360 degree camera, eight directional mics.
The camera stitches together a full view of the conference room up top, with the bottom 2/3 intelligently shifting the focus across multiple speakers. It will even put a whiteboard into the focus of the frame, if someone starts drawing. I thought it was pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I just thought the product looked cool after my neighbor mentioned it. Nothing more.
Yeah, agreed. Even places I've worked with wonderful internal IT still have problem users who can't figure videoconferencing, or have damaged/misconfigured their device in a way that prevents it.
It often comes down to the one person who actually knows the specific flavor of videoconferencing walking around and fixing everything for everyone, and everyone remote just mumbling and leaving the meeting.
As I work at an Apple shop, I wish Apple would come up with some decent videoconferencing application that would work with our Apple TVs and MacOS (no, Facetime does not count, neither does Zoom and it's glaring vulnerabilities)
Video conferencing is a problem that cannot be solved with software alone. I like to call it the 'last meter problem', as video conference issues are almost always caused by crappy consumer grade equipment.
Wireless routers are the biggest culprit. Convince people to use a wired connection and be amazed how much better video conferencing suddenly becomes.
It's probably a software problem at heart though, if you include firmware level. Since VGA-connectors went out of fashion I'm still to use a projector that Just Works without having to use it 10 times before figuring out all its quirks.
I work remotely and have a minimum of 1 morning video meeting, often more in a day. Cannot agree with this comment. The only thing that's gotten reliable is when certain things fail we kind of know what it is from past experience. "Jim. Please plug in your headphones or mute yourself, this happens once a week. JIIIM. JIIIIIM. Can we kick Jim from the call? Who has permission to kick someone from a call here?"
To the conferencing software's credit, it's generally user error. But when you have 10 people in a call, and only 2 of them really understand or even care about their conferencing software setup, things break a lot. I have to explain the concept of changing your recording device more than once a week. Usually to the same people again and again.
Well, this is the same kind of people who just drop stupid jokes and stuff on the floor during meeting, don't care about what happens in the meeting and are generally poor coworkers.
The only problem with remote is that incompetence is much more visible.
All you need to do is standardize quality equipment so everyone on your team has a similar setup and make sure your internet connection is good.
It's a relatively simple problem to solve. The amount of conference call failures I've experienced working remotely for an all-remote team is substantially lower than when I was working in-office, despite I'm probably on 5x the number of conference calls now.
At least in our company, it works pretty much flawlessly. We rarely have technical issues, and if we do it's a wider outage from our conferencing provider.
Those sound like issues with your IT department, employer, and/or video conference provider rather than issues with working from home. Any company with remote employees should require a consistent, stable solution
Funny coincidence because just few days ago I was using zoom for the first time long time. The image/sound quality for sure was crappy and it was lagging/spotty multiple times. On the other hand there was like 7 participants. I also don't like how you have to install separate app to use it - and I heard the OS X version had vulnerability issues.
When I'm hosting a video call I prefer google hangouts. Works OK without installing apps.
