Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences

Videoconferencing
History

The idea of joining voice and video (1 frame every 2 seconds) was first demonstrated in 1956 by AT&T. The resulting product, named Picturephone, was introduced and demonstrated at the 1964 World's Fair. It still took another 6 years (1970) before it was offered to the general public as a product for $160 a month. It did not attract users because of the high cost and large size.

Others became interested in the technology. Development continued and resulted in the 1982 product release of the first videoconferencing (VC) system. Compression Labs began selling VC systems for $250,000 with a connection cost of $1,000 per hour. In 1986, PictureTel entered the market with an $80,000 VC system and a connection cost of $100 per hour.

In 1990 the CCITT standard for ISDN conferencing was released and called H.320. The next year PictureTel unveiled their $20,000 VC system that could be connected for $30 per hour.  The following year AT&T again introduced their new Videophone for the home market. It cost $1,500. There still was little interest from the general public.

In 1991 both PictureTel and IBM demonstrated a PC version of videophone functionality. Thus began the development of videoconferencing on the Internet. In 1992 the first (v0.19) release of CU-SeeMe was developed at Cornell and made available for the MACintosh computer. Audio was not included until the 1994 release (v0.70b1). A Windows version also became available but audio was not available till the following year. By 1998, v1.0 was released and Cornell stopped development. The product was later taken over by a private company and developed into a commercial product..

Microsoft became a player in 1996 with their non-video (v1.0) release of NetMeeting. Four months later, video was included with the v2.0b2 release. Development continued until the final release (v3.01 sp2) in 2000. Microsoft has since dropped support for the product but it still continues to be widely used and still included with Windows XP distributions.

Over time new standards for communications continued to be developed that improved both the audio and video quality for videoconferencing. Today, commercial videoconference units are available at reasonable prices that cost-effectively use the Internet for connectivity.