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The True Cost of Video Conferencing
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By Amy Linley | Author Bio | Publish This Article
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It's easy to overlook or rationalize many things when it comes to the costs of video conference calling. There are more than a few companies competing for your business at several different levels of service. For a good quality video conference, you can expect to pay a certain amount. If you go for cheap or free services, well you get what you pay for. If you have ever looked at the price to do a quality conference call and said 'No,' maybe it's time to look at how much a different choice will cost.
The primary alternative to a video conference is to just go there. To really get a good feel for the impact of this choice, we'll look at some real world numbers. First, let's assume there is a five person meeting out of town and all but the host needs to fly to get there. We'll say their average flight costs $250. They each will need a rental car, hotel room, and food, costing around $1,470 all together. When we include their flights, the total becomes $2,470.
That would seem to be all related costs, except it's missing a major component: time away from the office. A one hour meeting out of town doesn't just cost you one hour of productive work. You have to factor in time spent getting to the meeting, staying overnight, and traveling the next day. Even for a short trip, on average you will lose a day's worth of productivity.
Looking past lost work time, think of the money you are paying that person to not be at work. If each of the four travelers makes around 75k a year, then the total amount of wages paid them for travel time, etc. is about $980. Add that to the other travel costs and the grand total for this one hour, out of town meeting is about $3,500 dollars.
Now let's look at video conferencing costs. A good average cost per minute, per person that you can expect to find is around 16 cents. This, of course, should include audio to go with your video. (Make sure you ask about the audio before you buy as some companies do not include it in their video package.) On average, if you are going to have a five person video conference call for one hour, you should be paying around $48 dollars.
Now it's ridiculous to compare $48 to $3,500 so let's get really out there and take a look at the other possible - but improbable -- costs behind a five person video conference call. Each person will need a computer, but if we are getting them specifically for this conference, let's buy them on the cheap for $600 dollars each. That's comes to $3,048 dollars so far. You have to be able to see each other, so we need to purchase 5 decent webcams at around $45 dollars each. The computers and webcams are nothing if there is no way to connect them, so we add $45 dollars for one month of internet service for each person. $3,000 for the computers, $225 for the webcams, $225 for the internet, and of course, $48 for the video conference adds up to the grand total of' $3,500. It's a tie!
By no means is this a literal estimation of costs; almost everyone has everything they need to do a video conference already. But if we started from fresh on both sides, it's very possible to end up with similar totals. The point is that with today's insane fuel costs, you really need a good reason to spend thousands of dollars instead of half of a hundred on a meeting.
Money is not the only thing you save using a video conference. Think of the carbon footprint a four person jaunt creates. We'll calculate four flights - round trip - using the Dallas / Fort Worth to Las Vegas flight path. Then we add four rental cars driving an average distance of forty miles to and from the hotel, meeting, and airport. There are many other carbon factors involved including electricity and such, but since they are negligible, we'll leave them out of this equation. The total for this particular one hour, out of town meeting for five people is 1.86 tons of carbon dioxide. Almost 2 tons created for one little meeting!
For a video conference carbon footprint, we can only actually point to impact due to power usage, but like the electricity used for the physical meeting, the carbon produced is miniscule. For simplicity's sake it is left out of our calculations.
Sometimes you have to be physically present at a meeting, there's no getting around that. What we can do, however, is make sure to identify exactly when it is crucial to be there. Other than that, we should realize that we can utilize our time, money, and resources much better. When you consider a video conference as an alternative, you shouldn't ask yourself if you can afford to do one. The question should be' can you afford not to?
About the author:
Get more information for a conference call or about video conferencing services from David Byrd at TalkPathConferencing.com.http://www.accuconference.com/conferencecalls.
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