What Is The Future Of Video Conferencing?

In 2020, the global video conference market will remain at a high growth stage. According to the latest IDC China video conference and collaboration market tracking report 2020 released by IDC, the size of China's video conference market reached US $950 million (about RMB 6.52 billion) in 2020, with a year-on-year increase of 18.9%. Meanwhile, IDC predicts that the scale of China's video conference market will exceed 10 billion yuan in 2024, and the cloud conference market accounts for nearly 40%. Due to the normalization of epidemic prevention and control and the rise of non-contact business, China's video conference market will enter a new wave of growth cycle.

After decades of history, the video conference system, from the "black technology" that only large multinational giants, large government units and military systems can have at the beginning to the "video conference room" built with internet communication system in the Internet era, has now rapidly iterated to the "era of consumer electronics", with richer applications and more sound ecology.

The conference market stimulated by demand is quietly changing, and manufacturers are also accelerating the adjustment of strategic layout. On the one hand, the huge use of video conferencing makes the market face a big test; On the other hand, video conferencing is affected by the change of user side demand. What manufacturers need to face is a new market, and the competition starts again.

In the post epidemic era, what kind of products can move people?

Public data show that in the first month after returning to work after the epidemic period, there were tens of millions of enterprises, nearly 200 million people working at home at the same time, and 100 million students attended online classes collectively. If the manufacturer cannot catch these users, it will be eliminated in this big test. The subsequent problem is retention. Like the Internet circle in the era of intensive cultivation of traffic, the video conference market has experienced rapid growth last year and has now entered a period of steady growth. How to retain customers has become the core issue in the current market.

Take Tencent conference as an example - the countermeasure is to start with integration, open up the online and offline scenes of enterprise conference, and create an intelligent conference scheme of "integration of software and hardware". Tencent conference is a cloud video conference product with a large number of users and rapid user growth rate in China. It has served government affairs, finance, education, medical treatment and other industries. Last September, when the number of users exceeded 100 million, Tencent conference released enterprise version, conference room connector, cloud video conference room solution "Tencent conference rooms", API, SDK and other product lines.

"Tencent conference rooms" is a new generation of cloud video conference room solution specially designed for offline conference space. It integrates the capabilities of high-definition audio and video conference, wireless screen projection, collaborative whiteboard and centralized management background, opens audio and video authentication and technology, and works with industry hardware providers to provide a new conference room collaboration experience with the combination of "software + hardware".

From the above changes of Tencent's product line, the current video conference is gradually moving towards integration and intelligence: IOT technology makes a variety of hardware devices in the conference scene truly form a network, and participants need fewer and fewer operation steps to start the conference, so as to effectively improve the use efficiency of conference equipment. On the other hand, the landing of AI and other cutting-edge technologies in the field of audio and video makes the conference system have a more intelligent "brain", which is closer to people's real meeting experience from the visual and auditory levels.

This also means that in the future, who can minimize the threshold for participants to use the conference system, ensure the product experience before, during and after the conference, and do a good job in linkage with the office ecology, so as to truly impress people with products.

With the landing of 5g and AI technologies, the in-depth application of video conferencing will be further opened to meet the needs of a wider range of scenarios. Enterprises need to quickly improve services and functions, and various new access devices and emerging technologies will accelerate the introduction into the market.