Facebook Portal and the Renaissance of Video Chat
I’ve been very curious about Facebook Portal since its launch announcement. The technology seemed immediately fascinating and, as a result, the user experience appeared different from anything seen until then. With my background as hardware product manager, I was also intrigued by a product coming from the most social, yet mostly software-centric, company on the planet.
The novel approach to an immersive experience
Video chat has been around for a while of course; I do remember being impressed, more than a decade ago, by the early prototypes of Cisco Telepresence, an high-resolution, life-size immersive video experience mainly designed for Enterprise customers; it was spectacular, especially back then, and you would not expect anything less than that for a tens-of-thousands-dollar Enterprise product, targeting the highest end of the market.
I looked for Portal video demos and reviews online, but I couldn’t get a real sense of the Portal experience until I tried it personally in a meeting with a Facebook employee. Without knowing, I immediately thought it must have been Portal on the other side, as the effect was truly unique. The experience was once again immersive, but not because of the size and the quality of the video like in Telepresence, but because of the perception of depth and movement.
Portal reminds me of the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional painting in art. In the 14th century, Giotto was the first artist to introduce the “illusion” that his figures were fully three dimensional beings inhabiting real space. Giotto did that right by recreating the “movement” of the figures through a combination of light and shadow and the spatial “depth” through his intuitive perspective emulating human visual perception. It was a revolution, one that gave life to the glorious Italian Renaissance and inspired the work around geometric perspective of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio, Leonardo, Michelangelo.
With its novel approach, I believe Portal is the Giotto of video chat, and started a Renaissance era in this space. The risk for Portal is that the other major players will quickly close the technology and design gap, “inspired” by the success of Portal and its realistic approach. So, how can Portal win the distribution game and build a substantial install base during this window of opportunity?
By distributing an hardware product as if it was a software one.
The “How did you do that?” effect and other software growth hacks to boost distribution of an hardware product
Thinking about Portal made me realize how distribution strategies typically applied to software or even more specifically to social apps can also be applied to hardware products.
The “How did you do that?” effect
While designing and building mobile apps, I was constantly looking for ways to get “free distribution”, in particular by unlocking virality and word of mouth. I remember reading plenty of articles on “growth hacks”, but none covered one that I’ve discovered working exceptionally well: I call it the “How did you do that?” effect.
The recipe is simple: take a common action between two or more people, e.g. sending a text message, and empower the sender, the user of your service, to do something special enough to trigger the “How did you do that?” question from the receiver, not yet a user of your service.
For example, with iSocialize, a social networking mobile app I productized, we were one of the first apps to offer a library of animated gifs that users could send via text message or social media. The “word of mouth” from just that one feature was incredible and a pull through for the rest of the (paid) features in the app. Recipients were watching their screen animating for the first time and moved by surprise were asking the sender…
“How did you do that?”
“I use this app, iSocialize!”
Word of mouth was naturally triggered and free distribution unlocked.
Portal generates that same “How did you do that?” reaction, here applied to the common action of placing a video call between two or more people. The more immersive and smooth experience that I described above is immediately noticeable: which camera today follows you while you move or widens its angle when other people join the call? Portal has also even more obvious, maybe just less commonly used, “how did you do that?” features, from Augmented Reality (AR) masks to Virtual Cards to Story Time.
Portal has the unique opportunity to trigger the virality of the “How did you do that?” effect to enter in as many households as possible, as fast as possible. The window opportunity might be short as other vendors will eventually catch up with the technology, confining Portal to stay a niche player.
So how could Portal amplify this initial technology and product advantage?
The power of existing social graphs
A very common strategy to drive software distribution is to leverage existing graphs by building on top of it: social graphs (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), business graphs (LinkedIn, Slack), personal graph (phone contact list). The “How did you do that?” effect gets amplified extremely well outside the initial product network when the content created by your product is distributed through large, existing graphs.
Who better than Portal can leverage their unique access to the largest social graphs on the planet to first unlock usage and then get viral distribution?
Social graphs to unlock usage
That’s exactly what Portal started doing. Instead of waiting to slowly build a network of Portal users (i.e. the initial product network) like for example Amazon Echo Show is forced to, Portal cleverly enabled at launch (November 2018) the ability to place video calls to Facebook and Messenger users even if they didn’t have Portal. A year later (December 2019), they enabled video calls to Whatsapp (and Workplace) users, expanding Portal reach to another immense user base. They then rapidly added the third virality axis with 1-to-Many group calls, by enabling Messenger and Whatsapp group calls (even though currently limited to 4 and 8 users), Live broadcast in Facebook personal profile, Groups and Pages to new Facebook Rooms.
These initial steps are fundamental for Portal to unlock immediate usage within the more intimate social graphs associated to video calls (e.g. family, close friends, co-workers). But how to use specific social graphs to maximize and accelerate Portal distribution?
(Specific) social graphs to unlock viral distribution
As we all know, the technology alone is not enough — consumers need to be educated and inspired with powerful use cases to trigger the viral loops I’m describing. Imagine then a marketing strategy centered around multi-cast/broadcast events: with 1-to-many interactions, you just need to give Portal to one user to trigger the “How did you do that?” effect for the many on the receiver side.
Facebook can/should discount or even give away Portal devices to fitness instructors, teachers, cooking class chefs, comedians for kids, in general anyone with an audience doing live video that involve movement or can take advantage from the device AR effects. Some of these categories in particular can have a very high viral coefficient: based on the prominence of the Story Time feature in marketing material, I have to believe that Portal is pretty successful in the kids-grandparents use case; offering Portal to teachers doing remote schooling will showcase the feature (“How did you do that?” effect) to tens of kids at a time, i.e. to users very much likely to convert.
It’s a product seeding strategy that can (and should) be highly targeted to be capital and margin efficient. Nobody better than Facebook is positioned to reach the right type of users based on profiling and even more specifically based on Facebook/Instagram Live data, now that these services are more and more popular. Longer term, independently of the type of discount offered if any, this 1-to-many profile should be one of most targeted by Portal “ads” to continue fueling the virality of the product.
Portal as a content creation device
Furthermore, Portal could be easily turned into a content creation device, where videos can be created and distributed to social and video networks, instead of being just a live video chat or broadcasting tool: a video camera that follows you, auto-zooms, or has AR effects is something highly desirable for today’s content creators as it can produce high quality videos at a fraction of the production cost.
This will open up another layer of distribution, now external to Facebook properties.
The Hotmail signature
On top of the “How did you do that” effect, a “growth hack” again inherited from software could be used to justify the “seeding” strategy of Portal devices: the famous Hotmail signature. When Hotmail launched, each email sent had a “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” at the bottom with a link to the Hotmail registration page; Hotmail grew like nothing else seen before.
Such user affiliation approach could be used with Portal too, by adding the label “Live on Portal” and “Made with Portal”.
Combined with the seeding strategy previously discussed, it might be easily considered as an acceptable “exchange” token for a free/discounted product. Such watermark could also evolve into something “cooler” like “Portal TV” or similar and turned into a form of validation and legitimacy, similar to blue checkmark in social profiles.
I personally would debate this watermark strategy, but again it’s interesting to note how software growth hack can be applied very well to hardware products too.
A compounding viral effect
It’s easy to see how the right distribution strategy could drive exponential growth for Portal due to the compounding effect of several layers of virality:
- The word of mount driven by the “How did you do that?” novelty of the product
- The focus on the one-to-many experiences to amplify that viral effect
- The ability to leverage the immense Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp networks to both offer Portal devices to broadcasting users and then distribute their Portal content
- The expansion to external networks like YouTube with the (for now missing) content creation component of Portal
One more thing
I talked a lot about distribution, but the product manager in me has one last question: What feature, reasonably simple to add to current product, could make the video chat experience even more “realistic” and unique?
The point of video chat is to connect two or more people that are not in the same room, right? So what if an AR effect is offered to virtually put user A in the room of user B and vice versa?
Each person will “blend” into the other person reality, improving mutual perception, making the experience more immersive and unlocking new activities that can be done “together” (e.g. dancing, playing, acting, singing, etc). The positioning of the interlocutor into the own space can be manually changed by dragging the other person around or zooming it for better (or fun) results, it can be mirrored or kept independent in each space.
Just another way to bring people together and a little bit closer.
