Unified messaging is getting more attention because it can integrate email, voicemail and fax into a single system designed to save users time and make diverse messages more easily accessible.
Some people think so.
A number of companies, too numerous to mention here, will be or are already doing video email. While these products, and the large number of other video products that use the messaging infrastructure as a backbone, provide some usefulness, it's highly unlikely that video in a messaging environment will take off in a big way anytime soon. Adding video to a messaging system would increase the storage requirement for the system dramatically. Related to the storage problem is the obvious problem of bandwidth response time in messaging systems is already a problem for some companies without the order of magnitude increase in traffic that video would impose. Another problem is the extra burden of deploying, configuring and maintaining a video camera on every desktop.