Consumer electronics for social video services

Video conference services have been there for quite a long time. First commercial services, enabled by ISDN, where mainly operated by Telcos, then IP enabled video conference and multiconference through the session description protocol (IETF RFC 4566). The common explanation why these services were not massively adopted was price, bandwidth limitation and poor usability. Today bandwidth has greatly improved thanks to ADSL penetration, and many free and commercial providers offer more usable video conference services. Still these services are not massively adopted by domestic users. We also base on the hypothesis that video conference integration with social networks and home networks, will dramatically improve usability and market, but we consider that both integration and usability will be greatly increased through flexible consumer electronics. In this article we explain the requirements of such a device, its architecture, and the advantages for users and technology adoption.