Video 101: calls and meetings as a business channel

Video is the business channel where people see each other live: a doctor and a patient, a bank officer and a new customer, a support agent and a broken appliance. It comes in two shapes. Embedded video runs inside your own website or app. A meeting link opens a call in a meeting product that someone else runs. As of October 2026, both mostly rest on WebRTC, the open standard for live audio and video built into modern browsers.¹²

In one line: video is the richest channel and the most demanding. It needs a steady connection on both sides, a person's full attention for a few minutes, and a clear rule for recording. It earns its place when a situation needs eyes, not just words.

A video call is three jobs, done one after another.

1. Signalling. The two sides exchange who they are and what they can send, through a server the application provides.
2. Connecting. Each device looks for a network path to the other. Most devices sit behind home or office routers that hide their real address, so a small public service called STUN tells each device what its address looks like from outside. Where no direct path exists, a relay called TURN carries the media instead.
3. Media. Audio and video flow, encrypted, directly between the devices or through the relay.²

WebRTC defines the browser's share of this work: access to the camera and microphone with the user's permission, the connection itself, and encrypted media. It deliberately leaves signalling, rooms, waiting areas and recording to the application.¹² Beyond a handful of people, a media server (often an SFU, a "selective forwarding unit") receives each person's stream and forwards it to the others, so that no phone has to send its video to everyone.

A meeting link follows the same path inside someone else's product: the meeting service runs the signalling and media servers, and the guest opens the link in a browser or in the service's app. Many meeting products and contact-centre platforms also connect to the phone network through SIP, so a guest without a camera can dial in by voice. Suites that bundle meetings, calling and chat for staff are usually called UCaaS; customer-service platforms that add video to calls and chats are called CCaaS. For the technical detail, read WebRTC in plain terms.

Video calling is older than the web, but it became an everyday business channel in two steps: phones with front cameras, then browsers that could place a call with no plug-in.

Apple introduced FaceTime with the iPhone 4 in June 2010, presenting video calling as something that needed no setup.⁶ In May 2011, Microsoft agreed to buy Skype, founded in 2003, for US$8.5 billion.⁷ Google released the real-time engine that came with its purchase of Global IP Solutions as the open-source WebRTC project, and in 2020 marked ten years of that work.³ Apple's Safari added WebRTC in June 2017, bringing browser video calls to the iPhone.⁵

The pandemic turned video into a habit. Zoom reported about 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 and more than 200 million in March 2020,⁹ then more than 300 million in April 2020.¹⁰ In January 2021, WebRTC became a W3C Recommendation together with a set of IETF standards;⁴ the Recommendation was most recently updated in March 2025.¹ Consumer services then consolidated: Microsoft retired Skype on 5 May 2025 and moved its users to Teams Free.⁸

Video is used everywhere, but unevenly, and it follows bandwidth. The ITU estimates that 74% of the world's population was online in 2025, with use ranging from 94% in high-income countries to 23% in low-income ones, and averaging 36% in Africa.¹³ A channel that needs a steady connection at both ends reaches fewer people where connections are thin or expensive. There, a voice call or a message often does the same job.

• Americas. In the United States, Pew Research Center found in April 2021 that 81% of adults had talked with others by video call since the pandemic began.¹¹ Daily use differed sharply by age: 27% of adults aged 18 to 49 made video calls at least daily, against 7% of those aged 65 and older.¹²
• Europe. Video is common in bank and trust-service onboarding, where the European identity-proofing standard ETSI TS 119 461 covers remote checks that use a camera.¹⁷
• Middle East and Africa. Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health runs Seha Virtual Hospital, which Guinness World Records recognised in October 2024 as the largest virtual hospital.¹⁴
• Asia-Pacific. India's national telemedicine service, eSanjeevani, had served more than 10 crore (100 million) patients by February 2023,¹⁵ and India's central bank allows banks to identify new customers over a live video session.¹⁶

The audience matters as much as the region. Younger adults are used to video; older customers may need a link that opens in one tap, with no account and a phone number to call if it fails.

Video earns its cost when someone needs to see something, prove something, or build trust face to face.

• Support that needs eyes. A customer points the phone at a boiler, a router or a damaged parcel, and the agent sees the problem in seconds. See customer support and when video belongs in support.
• Consultations. Doctors, therapists, lawyers, tutors and financial advisers meet clients without a trip. See video consultations and meetings.
• Identity checks (video KYC). A regulated firm verifies a new customer during a live session: the person shows an identity document and their face, and an officer or a system checks that they match. India's central bank allows this as a consent-based "video-based customer identification process" (V-CIP), with checks that the person is live and located in India.¹⁶ ETSI's TS 119 461 covers attended remote identity proofing with a camera and the risk of injection attacks, where a recorded or generated video is fed in place of the live camera.¹⁷
• Sales and business meetings. Demos and account reviews, usually by meeting link. See sales and lead follow-up.
• Booking-led services. Inspections, interviews and classes: the link goes out with the confirmation and the reminder. See appointment booking and reminders and fewer no-shows.
• Contact centres. An agent upgrades a phone call or a chat to video when words are not enough. See contact centre and the glossary entry for a contact centre.

Video platforms charge per participant-minute: each person connected counts for each minute they stay in the call. Recording, storage, transcription and live streaming are usually billed separately. Meeting products are more often sold per host seat per month, with video included. Two official examples, as the platform owners publish them, accessed in October 2026:

• Microsoft Azure Communication Services prices group calls at US$0.004 per participant per minute, the same for voice, video and screen sharing, and lists mixed audio-and-video recording at US$0.01 per minute. Microsoft notes that its examples are illustrative and may not reflect the latest prices.²³
• Amazon Chime SDK prices its examples at US$0.0017 per attendee-minute, billed in six-second increments, with media capture and live streaming charged on top.²⁴

A worked example at the first rate: a 30-minute consultation between two people is 60 participant-minutes, or US$0.24 before any recording. A one-hour team review with six people is 360 participant-minutes. Check the current rate card before you budget, because both pages change.

If you run video yourself rather than on a platform, the browser parts are free but relays and media servers are not, and support tickets about cameras and microphones are a real cost. See peer-to-peer video.

Three sets of rules meet in a video call: data protection, recording consent, and the rules of your sector. This is a summary, not legal advice; check the rules where you and your customers are.

Data protection. A video of a person is personal data. Under the EU's GDPR, facial images processed to identify someone uniquely are biometric data, a special category that may be processed only under specific exceptions, so a video identity check needs a clear legal basis.¹⁸ Where media servers and recordings are hosted is a data residency question that regulated buyers ask early.

Recording consent. The UK regulator, the ICO, says organisations may record video calls where they have a valid purpose that less intrusive methods, such as taking minutes, cannot achieve; before recording, they should tell people why, what for and how long the recording will be kept.¹⁹ In the United States, federal law allows a recording when one party to the conversation consents,²⁰ but some states go further: California requires the consent of all parties to record a confidential communication.²¹ Rules elsewhere differ again. A safe default everywhere is to announce recording at the start, show a visible indicator, and let people decline.

Sector rules. In US healthcare, the temporary flexibility that let providers use everyday video apps during the COVID-19 emergency expired on 11 May 2023, with a transition period to 9 August 2023, so telehealth video must now meet HIPAA rules in full.²² In banking, video identity checks follow central-bank rules such as India's V-CIP¹⁶ and, in Europe, identity-proofing standards such as ETSI TS 119 461.¹⁷

• The weakest connection sets the quality. One participant on a poor mobile signal degrades the call for everyone. Offer an audio-only option and a phone dial-in.
• Delay matters more than sharpness. People talk over each other when latency grows. Media servers near your users help more than higher resolution; see latency you can actually feel.
• Most failures are not the network. Blocked camera permissions, the wrong microphone and a browser that remembers an old refusal cause most "it doesn't work" calls.
• Strict networks. Company firewalls can block direct paths, so calls need a TURN relay, which costs bandwidth.²
• Attention. Video asks both people to stop what they are doing. For a simple question, a message is kinder.
• Faked video. For identity checks, a camera feed can be replaced by a recording or a generated face; current standards ask for detection of injected streams.¹⁷
• Recording sprawl. Recordings pile up in storage nobody reviews, long after their purpose has passed.
• Accessibility. Offer captions and a text chat alongside the picture.

Only announced work and published standards are listed here.

• The standard keeps moving. W3C updated the WebRTC Recommendation in March 2025, and the working group continues to extend it.¹
• Live streaming on call technology. The IETF published WHIP as RFC 9725 in March 2025: a simple way to send WebRTC video into streaming services, so broadcasts can use the same low-delay technology as calls.²⁵
• Consolidation. Consumer calling keeps folding into workplace suites, as Skype's retirement in favour of Teams Free in 2025 showed.⁸
• Defences against faked video. Version 2 of ETSI TS 119 461, published in February 2025, defines detection of injection attacks for remote identity proofing.¹⁷

• By need. Choose video for consultations, inspections, identity checks and support that must see; avoid it for status questions, codes and alerts.
• By location. Where connectivity is strong, video can be the default for consultations; where it is thin or costly, lead with voice and keep video optional.¹³
• By audience. For business buyers, a meeting link is normal. For consumers, embedded video that opens in one tap, with no account, is easier, especially for older customers.¹²

See the video channel page for providers, Voice 101 for when a phone call is enough, and which channel for which need to compare video with every other channel.