If you talk to daily Instagram users, you'll find out what problem it solves. In particular, it was the lucky winner in the crowd of early photo-sharing-on-mobile apps. But the demand for that was proven by early photo sharing successes like Flickr. Realizing people would want to do that on their pocket camera device is not a big leap given what people were already doing to share photos from their mid-aughts cameraphones phones.

There's no such plausible story for 3D video calls. It's not like people are already demanding 3D displays for any of their other 3D stuff. The 3D first-person shooter, for example, has been around for decades. But 3D displays have never been popular despite being available for at least a decade.

I (and probably everyone in immigrant communities) will get such a thing to my family and our parents as soon as we can afford it.

That's an interesting hypothesis, but I'd need to see some data. Since you haven't experienced it, you would be buying based on hype, on the concept of 3D. As I said, I'm not arguing that the novelty is appealing. I'm saying that once people actually experience it and the novelty wears off, people stop caring.

Another issue here is that this is being sold as like "being there", but it's more like "being there at a jail" where you can see person but can't get close to them, can't touch them, can't hand them anything. I have immigrant friends who do calls with their parents basically daily. They do it with mid-grade consumer tech, even though they could easily afford big screens and high-res cameras. That suggests to me that image size and video quality are not as important for this market as one might think at first blush.

You're not winning anything with casting Skype on TV, except messing with another remote for audio controls (which is in no way immersive or often not even high quality).

And yes OF COURSE I predicate buying on it actually delivering to the extent people describe it in the marketing video, it's ridiculous I have spell it out.

Casting Skype to a TV is not the only possibility Right now with off the shelf hardware one could make a great video-call station. 4k screen, 4k camera, high-quality mics and speakers. But approximately nobody does it because laptops and iPads and phones are generally good enough for them.

That to me demonstrates that, contra your initial assertion, there isn't a big market for this.

As to the last part, you've gone from "I will get it" no questions asked to what sounds like "I will get it if it checks out". But that's a big jump. You've gone from an early adopter to a mainstream purchaser. From one of those people that buys things on Kickstarter to the much, much larger group who want to see proof of value before they buy.

I think that's very reasonable, but it's exactly the kind of reasonable behavior that has killed 3D over and over in the past. By definition novelty doesn't last, so by the time mainstream purchasers might be ready, the social proof just isn't there.

What I enjoy here most is how you clearly know better than me (M44, immigrant, kids, MSc. SE, embedded systems engineer) what I actually want.

It depends on what you mean by want. Are you having feelings of desire? Sure. That's the point of demos and commercials. I fully believe you have those feelings, and trust you to be an expert on them.

But I've done a lot of customer development over the years. People say all sorts of things. The question when doing market analysis is what they'll actually do. And the better guide there is what they're actually doing , not what they say they would do.

So when you say that "everyone in immigrant communities" will buy it, I'm going to be skeptical because what people are actually doing is nothing like that. They could already move in this direction with existing tech. As far as I can tell, they aren't. If you have evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.

I also can't find evidence of third parties competing with shared higher-quality video call setups, which is what we'd expect to see if the demand were there but the price hadn't fallen enough yet. That's the pattern we saw with video arcades and internet cafes/wangbas, for example. Wangbas are still getting by because they've shifted to gamers, who are willing to pay up for better hardware and connections (and room for team play). But I can't find mention of any similar shift for video calls. E.g. India's PCO network seems to be in rapid free-fall, not reinventing themselves around high-quality video calls. That suggests what all the other market data suggests: to the extent people want video calling, relatively low-quality gear like smartphones and laptops are in practice sufficient.

>Tell me a problem WhatsApp solves. It's just a fancy SMS.

I gather it mostly solves that SMS is expensive in a lot of contexts. Personally I never use it because most of the people I text with have US phones. And the one person who doesn't, we use Facebook.

Yes? Other than not being hip, how is Instagram better than Myspace? WhatsApp at least added features over SMS, although it sacrificed interoperability and went all-in on a closed system to get there. Newer is not always better.