History of videotelephony

The videophone as a concept began to materialize shortly after the telephone was patented in 1876, and its history is closely connected to that of the telephone. Many attempts were made to create a practical video-telephone, and were met with repeated commercial failure because of high cost, lack of popular demand and a failure to reach the threshold for the network effect to apply.

Videotelephony finally reached the mainstream in the 2000s with the subsumption of videotelephony into modern multifunction smartphones and videoconferencing apps which have made videotelephony ubiquitous at the same time as eliminating the videophone as a distinct product category.