People will soon be making video calls everywhere there’s an Internet connection, according to a new report on GigaOM Pro, “Can You See Me Now? The New World of Consumer Visual Communications” (subscription required). Authors Alfred Poor and Michael Wolf estimate that global video calls will grow to nearly 30 billion a year in 2015 from just under 600 million in 2008, driven in part by its availability on mobile devices and televisions.
The report breaks down the estimate of number of video calls made over PCs, mobile devices and TVs. From 2013 onwards, mobile and TV calls are expected to start accounting for a significant proportion of the total, with growth on those platforms seen accelerating sharply while growth in PC video calls declines.
Such staggering growth in video calls is good news for web workers. Many of us were among the first to take advantage of the cheap video calling available through services like Skype to help us stay connected with colleagues who we rarely, if ever, see in the flesh; mobile video chatting will help us to maintain that connection even when we’re out of the office.
Perhaps more significantly, though, we’re likely to see a rapid acceleration of innovation in video chatting tools as demand rises — Skype’s recent addition of group video chat is just the start. Developers will also start to integrate video features into many existing tools, enhancing their collaborative potential. This should bring the kind of advanced functionality currently only seen in expensive corporate telepresence systems to within the budget of freelancers and small businesses, which will allow even more people to adopt a web working lifestyle.
To read more about the future of the consumer video chat market, check out the comprehensive report on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).
How do you see ubiquitous video calling changing your work?


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