[onion2k]

The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired.

That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.

[beachy]

The video chat market though would be approximately a gazillion times larger than the professional video and film industry wouldn't it?

[onion2k]

I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.

[addandsubtract]

>the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.

Factor in the support you need to accommodate your customers and you have your answer :P

[onion2k]

You can just ignore support entirely and then it costs nothing. It's what Google does.

[ooobit2]

Better yet, create a "Help Center," that has 1,900 articles that all have a link that says, "Need more help?" and then that link goes to another of the 1,900 articles that also has a link that says, "Need more help?" And that link goes to another article, which has a popup that reads: Call 1-800-ABCDEFG. Then they call that number and get an automated system that says, "Thank you for calling. How can I help you today? You can say things like, 'I need help,' and 'I need different help.'" And then they have to speak all the menu choices. And the 0 button doesn't take them to a representative, only back to the first prompt.

This is too much fun to brainstorm.

[epanchin]

Good webcams are hard to find at the moment because people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.

[buzzerbetrayed]

> people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.

MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.

[nl]

Pretty hard to compete with the free implementations in most video chat tools...

[cvhashim]

What about marketing to live streamers and youtubers

[mlthoughts2018]

Surveillance video processing and intelligence services are probably by far the largest use cases for video background removal and similar techniques. Far smaller in terms of number of customers, but far far larger in terms of revenue specifically for this capability.

Millions of people paying peanuts (attributable to this feature) is way less than a few hundred or thousand research / defense labs, contractors, etc., paying tens of thousands up to even millions on licensed software for this type of thing.

[rasz]

In both teleconferencing and surveillance you are dealing with static background, no need for fancy ML algorithms.

[mlthoughts2018]

No, not true. Surveillance cameras mounted on police cars, helicopters, etc. Even in stationary cameras, scene understanding is a hard problem. Suppose someone wheels a dolly of boxes into a warehouse and leaves them. Are they now part of the background? Are they suspicious boxes? The coarse level state transition of objects in the scene is really hard to solve even with heavy ML.