Apple says “people have been dreaming about video calling for decades.” Maybe some people have, but were they actually having nightmares?

While I was in San Francisco this week, I carried out a quick straw poll of mobile video experts and all five of them said mobile video calling won’t be big any time soon despite all the hoopla coming from Cupertino, California. Apple has made its new video calling service, FaceTime, one of the big selling points for the iPhone 4, the first Apple handset to have a camera on the front.

As mobile industry veterans are well aware, video calling was one of the fancy new services used to justify the huge fees paid for 3G licenses in Europe. One decade on, Europe’s cities are blanketed with high-speed 3G networks, but very few people use video calling. The reasons are both technical (incompatible handsets, fiddly software and shaky connections) and conceptual (people are either too self-conscious or they value their privacy too much).

By limiting FaceTime to iPhone 4-to-iPhone 4 connections over WiFi, at least initially, Apple is aiming to eliminate many of the technical issues that have dogged earlier attempts at video calling. But is the concept also fundamentally flawed? Some people won’t want a caller to see that they aren’t where they are supposed to be or they haven’t shaved or applied any make-up. Ironically, FaceTime may even put some people off buying the iPhone 4, if they think they’ll have to look their partner in the eye every time he or she calls.

Homesick business travellers

No sign of that yet though. Apple aficionados have been rushing to pre-order the iPhone 4 and crashing the company’s sales systems. Moreover, even if video calling isn’t a service you want to use every day, it is a service you may want to use occasionally.

If FaceTime is easy enough and slick enough, there is definitely a market, for example, among homesick business travellers wanting to see their kids’ faces. On a conventional phone call, it can be tough to engage young children in a conversation – they usually want to show you something you can’t see. That may be one reason why Skype’s video calling service, which is primarily laptop-based, is gaining traction. But laptop webcams can be a pain to set up and children won’t necessarily stand still in front of a computer.

Although FaceTime will be easy-to-use and portable, a family will still need to go to the considerable expense of buying two iPhone 4 handsets until Apple delivers on Steve Jobs’ promise to make the service an open standard, which will be key to Facetime’s ultimate success. But Apple’s rivals may prefer to take a more neutral-approach. The mobile operators, Skype, Nokia, Google, Microsoft and other key players aren’t accustomed to seeing the words ‘open’ and ‘Apple’ in the same sentence.

In any case, FaceTime isn’t going to be a true test of mobile video calling. Apple’s decision to limit the service to WiFi is probably the right one given that some mobile operators are trying to release capacity on their 3G networks by offloading as much iPhone traffic as possible on to WiFi. But if FaceTime does take off, the industry will come under pressure to make it also work over 3G and 4G networks.

Conversely, if most FaceTime users do turn out to be business travellers sitting in their WiFi-enabled hotel rooms, then the service really doesn’t need to be mobile. It just needs to be easier-to-use and more convenient than video-calling over Skype.

 

David Pringle

This article was first published on the GSMA’s Mobile World Live portal. David moderates discussion forums on the site and is a freelance media and investor relations consultant.

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members