2001: a Space Odyssey:  On Space Station V, Dr. Heywood Floyd has a moment to spare before catching the Aries shuttle to Clavius Moon colony, so he does what any father travelling on business does.  He phones home.  But this isn't one of those dial the operator and ask to reverse the charges affairs.  Floyd rings from a hands-free videophone that has a twenty-inch colour display and takes credit cards. 

Cost: $1.75 for five minutes–and from Earth orbit, too.

Yes, it looked as though by 2001 the videophone would be well established.

Or would it?

For almost a century, the path of history has been strewn with scheme after scheme to unite television with the telephone and each one fell flatter than my wallet at the end of the month.  What happened?  Why hasn't the videophone caught on?  What is the elusive element that has denied success?  

Let's look at one famous attempt by a company to breach the walls of tomorrow.

At the 1964 New York World's Fair, AT&T revealed something that was not only a breakthrough in telepresence solutions, but an exercise in butt-clenching awkwardness as well.  I give you the picturephone!

This modern marvel was the first serious attempt to market a videophone as a consumer good aimed at the mass market and AT&T put everything they had behind their efforts to develop and market it.  Not that they had an easy time even with all the resources of one of America's most powerful corporations to draw on. 

In the '60s, there was nothing like the Internet and the digital revolution hadn't even reached the gestational stage, let alone infancy.  To seamlessly integrate the picturephone into the existing network meant using ordinary phone lines, which it did.  Three of them instead of the usual two.  And it required special switches to be installed at the local television exchange.  Even if all that is taken care of, the engineers faced the congealed fat of the telecommunications age: Bandwidth.  A television signal uses 333 times as much bandwidth as a voice channel, which meant that at best the picturephone was relegated to small viewing screens–and black and white only, of course.

Despite these limitations AT&T was sure that it was on to a winner and confidently predicted having three million picture phones generating $5 million in revenues by the 1980s.  To help ensure this, they embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign that included making the picturephone the centrepiece of their pavilion at that marketplace of the future; the 1964 New York World's Fair.  There fair visitors were invited to step into a booth and chat over the picturephone with equally bewildered visitors at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

Yes, there is nothing like combining the excitement of new technology with the howling mortification of having to wrack your brains to carry on a conversation while cold sober with total strangers on the other side of the continent.   

And just to make sure that the experience was truly unpleasant,  the visitors were made to fill out a survey questionnaire afterwards.

The results were less than sterling.  People were impressed by the technology, but they didn't like the picturephone.  The controls were too confusing and the picture too small. 

But it had touchtone!

So, AT&T went back to the drawing board for another four years and in 1970 rolled out the new and improved picturephone.  This time they didn't just exhibit it; they put it out for the customers.  At least, they did in New York and Chicago.  It isn't easy to find the words to describe how well the picturephone did, but the phrase "lead balloon" comes fairly close.

The picturephone was a disaster.  People queued in droves to avoid buying it.  What happened?  Part of the reason was the cost.  Picturephone was not cheap: $125 per month plus $21 per minute.  Also, there was the problem of how you use a picturephone when you're one of the very few people who have one.  Without a compelling reason to think that people were going to sign up for picturephones real quick you're faced with the reality that there's a whole lot of nobody to talk to out there. 

Whatever the reasons, the picturephone limped along briefly and then was quietly pulled at a loss of $1 billion.

What's really curious is that we now have videophone technology that is so cheap that anyone with a computer can set one up for a few quid and yet hardly anyone does.  Certainly, videoconferencing has become big business, but not that big, and the home market is non-existent.

Why?

Having worked with videophone systems myself, and having answered the phone first thing in the morning after being up all night with a cranky baby, no tea, unshaven, and generally looking like hell, I can attest to what the missing factors are:  1) People really do not want that much intimate contact and 2) Videophones are a pain. 

Never mind that cameras are incredibly difficult beasts to work with outside of a studio environment.  The thought of having even my closest friends seeing me before I'm caffeinated doesn't bear thinking about. 

At work, it's just about as bad.  Whenever I've been in a videoconference, the camera was a thing to be dreaded rather than welcomed.  Most people switch off the picture because it's distracting.   You have no idea if anyone is looking at your image, so you have to sit rigidly in camera focus, making it bloody hard to switch on the speakerphone so you can ignore the whole thing and work on the report that's due at the end of the day.

Small wonder that more often than not I see expensive videoconferencing rigs gathering dust in favour of speakerphones and application sharing systems.

Gives it that nice, impersonal touch.

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