Skype on your TV: How Much is Too Much?

By now, everyone has heard about Skype’s CES announcement that it would soon offer video calling service via television, effectively bringing teleconferencing to a couch near you. Though undeniably a huge boon for small businesses and education, what’s really intriguing about this is not the tech itself but the lack of excitement, or some cases outright questioning, of it (like here , here, or Joel Stein’s article here). Video calling was once touted as the next big step in personal communication; however, over time it’s become clear that many of us may not want to focus on conversations with the intensity that video requires. Today only 34% of Skype’s calls use video even though it’s been available for quite a while.

Why?

The rise of SMS and email as the primary communication channel for many people has shown that as a group, we generally do not want or need calls to be interactive. SMS and email are non-interactive: you send a message and forget about it until the response comes. Video requires both parties to pay full attention to each other. One could argue that it’s time we’re after, not the sharing of it. Joel Stein asked Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor of social studies of science and technology, about this very thing. Her response was illuminating:

She told [Joel] people are not only uninterested in Skype, we’re also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. “Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that,” she said. “But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the decoupling of programming from television and how this is perhaps finally driving the rise of two-way or interactive content. What’s compelling about Interactive TV is not that I can share the experience with someone – video games offer that ‘lean-forward’ style of interactivity already and we- but that I should be able do it in a way that is only as interactive as I need it to be while still sharing the experience. SMS offers the ability to share the experience while not interrupting it. And with recent data showing that SMS users under 25 send an average of 70+ messages a day it’s clear that we’re just beginning to tap its potential.