Why the picturephone failed

David Szondy has a new page in his delightful collection, Tales of Future Past. It's about the picturephone and why it failed to catch on. The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey featured Dr. Heywood Floyd talking to his daughter (and the bushbaby she got for her birthday) over picturephone from a space station in earth orbit, but in real life, the picturephone was a marketing failure:

The picturephone was a disaster. People queued in droves to avoid buying it. What happened? Part of the reason was the cost. Picturephone was not cheap: $125 per month plus $21 per minute. Also, there was the problem of how you use a picturephone when you're one of the very few people who have one. Without a compelling reason to think that people were going to sign up for picturephones real quick you're faced with the reality that there's a whole lot of nobody to talk to out there.

Whatever the reasons, the picturephone limped along briefly and then was quietly pulled at a loss of $1 billion.

Szondy explains some of the technical issues that made analog videotelephony so expensive, and also explains why, now that the digital version of the technology is much, much cheaper, picturephones still haven't caught on:

Having worked with videophone systems myself, and having answered the phone first thing in the morning after being up all night with a cranky baby, no tea, unshaven, and generally looking like hell, I can attest to what the missing factors are: 1) People really do not want that much intimate contact and 2) Videophones are a pain.