Research: Home video calling is set to boom; better technology is making it happen

If you own a relatively new smartphone or tablet like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s iPad, chances are you've at least noodled around with video calling through any number of apps including Facetime, Tango, Skype and more.

Ditto in the office. Videoconferencing isn't yet ubiquitous, but the gains in popularity it has seen as a cost-cutting tool and for collaboration among teams point to it becoming so.

So, if you think you're likely to avoid it at home, think again. The technology is a nascent one, and there are only a few vendors pushing it hard, but, according to new research, it's likely to grow more than tenfold by 2015.

Attribute it, in large part, to the popularity of social networks like Facebook and Google+, which, with the increasing prevalence of services like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s Skype are beginning to push living room video calling to the forefront.

In the U.S., cable provider Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) is teaming with Skype to launch video calling for its customers; globally, Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) continues to introduce new high-end, low-cost webcams, like its 1080p C920 for $99 that it introduced earlier this month.

NPD In-Stat, in research released today, forecasts total users will increase from 1.5 million in 2011 to 16.4 million in 2015. Granted, the numbers aren't huge, put the potential is.

While video calling has been around for several years, the ease of connecting on mobile devices has helped push it to the forefront of consumer adoption.

The digital home market, however, has been slow to ripen. But, with social networking as a catalyst, expect that to change.

As NPD analyst Amy Cravens points out, "While the mobile market is experiencing the strongest growth in usage, the PC and living room calling markets are also experiencing a surge of large player activity."

She said Skype's integration with Facebook and Google+'s incorporation of Hangout has provided a new perspective.

"Introducing this capability to the living room, enabling HDTV video chat, is an additional aspect of the market that is being endorsed by industry giant Microsoft as well as leading device OEMs including Panasonic, Samsung and LG," she said.

Her forecast? A whopping increase in video calling minutes approaching 550 billion minutes in 2015, up from just 141 million minutes in 2010.

But despite increasing bandwidth to homes, Internet connection speeds have remained the weak-link in HD video calls. While VGA only requires 147 Kbps of data, full 1080p HD requires nearly one Mbps.

For video calling technology to reach full acceptance by consumers, HD calls likely will be required.

Logitech's VP and GM for business Eric Kintz agreed, telling FierceEnterpriseCommunications that its own research and customer feedback shows users want simplicity of use and "sheer quality" of picture. He says the new C920 is "the best quality camera we've produced to date," both in terms of optics and technology. The C920, he said, encodes the video at the camera rather than relying on a computer, which means less processing power is needed, opening up the range of laptops, desktops and connected devices, like smart TVs, that will be able to support high-quality video calling.--Jim