If you call a number from a phone, any phone can answer. If you email someone, any email client can answer. SMS isn’t quite so universal (emoji and gifs can get lost), but you can still send a text to almost anyone. You can watch and listen to MP formats almost anywhere with numerous applications, including web standard video in most browsers. Why isn’t there an interoperable form of video calls? Instead we have WebEx, Zoom, Skype, Facetime and LOTS of options that can’t interoperate with each other.
In: Engineering
There was a standard (and it probably still exists) in the 2.5G/3G era. The thing was, the mobile networks charged rediculous prices (like 50p per minute) – so nobody used it.
Then phones started to offer decent Internet capabilities. Since anyone can make an app that works over the Internet, lots of companies did. From a monetization point of view, it’s not really in a company’s interest to follow a central standard because you want to lock people in to your service, so no standardisation happened.
A text or email has a standard format and way of being read and unpacked, whereas a video call doesn’t really.
There’s lots of video formats and different compression algorithms. Sure, these could be made standard, but you’d have to have everyone agree which won’t happen, especially since different OS use video differently
Apple is a good example – they use a patented IBM compression method and forbid others to use it
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