Videoconferencing is OK, but it is still common to have issues with it. Bad image quality, setup by lowest common denominator etc. Often you use that 15 minutes just by trying to make it work properly.
My neighbor owns a consultancy. They’ve started shipping the Meeting Owl camera to their bigger clients to improve their meeting experience. It’s has a 360 degree camera, eight directional mics.
The camera stitches together a full view of the conference room up top, with the bottom 2/3 intelligently shifting the focus across multiple speakers. It will even put a whiteboard into the focus of the frame, if someone starts drawing. I thought it was pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I just thought the product looked cool after my neighbor mentioned it. Nothing more.
It often comes down to the one person who actually knows the specific flavor of videoconferencing walking around and fixing everything for everyone, and everyone remote just mumbling and leaving the meeting.
As I work at an Apple shop, I wish Apple would come up with some decent videoconferencing application that would work with our Apple TVs and MacOS (no, Facetime does not count, neither does Zoom and it's glaring vulnerabilities)
Wireless routers are the biggest culprit. Convince people to use a wired connection and be amazed how much better video conferencing suddenly becomes.
To the conferencing software's credit, it's generally user error. But when you have 10 people in a call, and only 2 of them really understand or even care about their conferencing software setup, things break a lot. I have to explain the concept of changing your recording device more than once a week. Usually to the same people again and again.
The only problem with remote is that incompetence is much more visible.
It's a relatively simple problem to solve. The amount of conference call failures I've experienced working remotely for an all-remote team is substantially lower than when I was working in-office, despite I'm probably on 5x the number of conference calls now.
When I'm hosting a video call I prefer google hangouts. Works OK without installing apps.