I remember seeing a land-line phone with video capability on a prime time talk show sometime in the 2000s as it was presented as a thing from the future. I'm glad that never really took off :D
ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor.
It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet)
Even if you got a couple price insensitive buyers, the technology is only useful if there's a network effect and that's where it broke down.
You weren't emailing their phone, it was an inbox they'd see next time they dialup to logon to the internet. It wasn't some obvious gain and faxing documents was a more reliable way to get to someone because you're changing their environment with a fax
The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time grasping today.
You want that era? Here's two things to flip through
https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000
https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine
I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/
I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right.
That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.