Video is the new floor
Two weeks into working from home, every interaction is a video call. What that does to expectations for video, and what's missing from the tools.
Everyone at the studio and at Amanda has been working from home for two weeks. BC declared a public health emergency last week, schools are closed, and like everyone else our whole day now runs through video calls. Standups, client meetings, investor updates, one-on-ones, a friend’s birthday party on Saturday, my parents on WeChat video every other evening.
A month ago video calls were something you did for remote meetings. Now they’re the default way people see each other. I’ve been thinking about what that does to the medium.
The quality floor went up and down at the same time. Down, because everyone is on a laptop webcam in bad light with kids in the background, and nobody minds. Up, because we all now spend six hours a day looking at faces through video, and small problems that were tolerable in a weekly call become exhausting. A slight audio delay makes people talk over each other. Eye contact doesn’t exist because the camera is above the screen. The gallery view of a dozen small faces is more tiring than a room with the same people, and I think part of that is that you can’t tell who’s looking at whom.
Most of those are problems I’ve spent my career on, in other forms. Faces, gaze, lighting, latency. None of the video tools do much with the face beyond compressing it. There’s room for a lot: relighting your face so you don’t look like you’re in a cave, correcting gaze so you appear to look at the camera when you look at the screen (Apple tested this with FaceTime in a beta last year), separating your voice from the dishwasher, blurring or replacing the background. Some of this exists already, mostly as rough features.
My guess is that a lot of what’s happening now becomes permanent, even after this is over. People who never used video calls have now learned how. Companies that swore they couldn’t work remotely are doing it. Families with grandparents far away are seeing each other more than before. When something becomes the default for a whole population in a month, it usually doesn’t go all the way back.
That means video is about to become a much bigger part of how people communicate, work and learn, and the tools are primitive for what they now have to carry. Whoever makes a call feel more like being in a room will have a lot of users.
For us at Amanda, this is also a direct question. Our business is people in rooms. The rooms are closed. We’re thinking hard about what that means.