Today, with apps and services like Zoom, Skype and FaceTime, video phone calls are cheap, easy, and readily available on PCs and smartphones. A long-term vision that began a long time ago. Here's the story of how it happened.
Pandemic permitting, video telephony still remains only a small part of the total call volume. There are many reasons, perhaps most people don't always want to be seen on a call. However, the new services perhaps mark the ultimate success of a long-held vision: that one day all phone calls would have video as well as audio. Many decades before Zoom. This is the story of Picturephone.
Picturephone, the progenitor of Zoom
AT&T's Picturephone was presented as a futuristic demonstration at the New York World's Fair in 1964. A relatively long silence followed, then it was commercially offered in Pittsburgh and Chicago in 1970, until it was withdrawn a few years later. But the story of Zoom's ancestor was born long, long ago: la Bell Labs (AT&T's research and development division) held a well-publicized demonstration at its New York headquarters in April 1927. The centerpiece of the event was a conversation between the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in Washington and the president of AT&T Walter Gifford in New York.
The moving image of Hoover was viewed at 50-line resolution by both Gifford and the invited audience. Further demonstrations followed in 1930, but the electromechanical system used proved to be a dead end. The war then did the rest.
Bell Labs only resumed research on videophones in 1956. And from this work came the debut I was telling you about, in April 1964.
The debut of the Picturephone at the New York Expo and subsequent attempts
A series of eight Picturephone booths allowed visitors to make video calls. They generally conversed with visitors to adjacent booths, or a similar booth located at Disneyland California. It was a very popular booth: Bell Labs interviewed over seven hundred of the large number of visitors: yet only 50% of them considered viewing in a phone call important.
In a next step, AT&T opened public Picturephone theaters in New York, Chicago, and Washington two months later. You could rent a "couple" of booths at rates from 16 to 27 dollars for the first 3 minutes of conversation. From 130 to 600 euros today. Over the next six months only 71 calls were made, and then the number dropped until 1970. In the final year the number of calls was ZERO.
Despite these setbacks AT&T did not give up, choosing to focus on the positive reactions from the 1964 Expo. In the following years, he improved the Picturephone. The new device, known as the Picturephone MOD II, was a technological tour de force. It had an innovative silicon photodiode array camera, a zoom lens, and some graphics capabilities. Zoom's new granddaddy had a 5,25 x 5-inch screen, suitable for showing a single person. A full motion black and white image with a resolution of 250 lines and 30 fps gave the ability to focus on the speaker or a document placed in front of the unit. Sound was provided by a tone speaker. The new Picturephone required three pairs of twisted copper wires to operate.
Story of a giant
AT&T had been guided for more than 50 years by a well-known corporate mission: to reach everyone in the United States by telephone. A mission accomplished in 1969, when more than 90% of American families had a telephone at home. Many then said to themselves that the next step would be universal video telephony. A logical step, right? Thus, in its 1969 annual report, AT&T (pre)said with certainty: “with approximately one million sets in use, the Picturephone service will generate a billion dollars by 1980.” The following year's report predicted 50.000 installations in 25 cities by 1975. A press release the following year even predicted a million installations by 1980. Director Stanley Kubrick sent a team to Bell Labs to study the future of telephony.
The result? The inclusion of a Picturephone booth in “2001 A Space Odyssey.”
Large-scale (re) launch
With great confidence, AT&T introduced commercial Picturephone service in Pittsburgh on July 1970, 160. Initially, Zoom's grandfather's focus was on large corporate customers, as the service was expensive: $XNUMX a month for equipment and service , and the first thirty minutes of calls. Additional calls were $0,25 per minute. At the current exchange rate it costs 860 euros per month, with 1.50 euros per minute of calls beyond the first half hour: a service clearly intended for those who could afford it. The following year Picturephone expanded to Chicago. The devices could also transmit documents and graphics, although limited by the 250-line resolution.
Again no customers were found. In 1972, Pittsburgh peaked at 32 installations. In Chicago, AT&T reduced the price to $ 75 per month for the service and the first forty-five minutes of calls to try to stimulate demand. At the current exchange rate it is 475 euros per month. At the beginning of 1973, the peak was 453 installations. That year AT&T named a new CEO, John de Butts. And the first thing he did was pull the plug.
Why didn't Picturephone work?
There were many reasons.
The first It's the chicken-and-egg problem that plagues all new network technologies: a Picturephone is only useful if the person you want to contact has one. A new technology needs a niche group of enthusiasts to support it in these early years. And the Picturephone did not find such a group. The second one was the cost: excessive even for targeted corporate markets.
Most new technologies are initially expensive, but then drop in price. AT&T was confident that costs would decline over time, with the imminent deployment of digital technologies, but Picturephone didn't last that long.
The following years up to Zoom
Videotelephony still seemed such an obvious extension of telephone service that there were other attempts even after the failure of the Picturephone. AT&T itself also introduced a color videophone in 1992, the AT&T 2500. Using data compression technologies, it offered a small color image over standard telephone lines. Although sold as a pair and marketed for grandparents to see their distant grandchildren, it did not find a market.
Other companies tried in the 90s and early 2000s and failed. Of course, the rise of Internet has only delivered on the promises of the Picturephone in the 21st century: videotelephony is available (if not required) and photos, documents, graphics and information are shared globally. It took a pandemic for its definitive explosion, with Zoom and other platforms. And the Clubhouse social network shows how there is a large "niche" of people who still prefer voice alone.
