“Before this, we just used a speakerphone,” said Scott Jones. “I guess it was the second or third night we had the video, we had one of the parents on the call. We could see her watching us and watching her daughter’s face as we talked about her progress. I broke in and said, ‘You know, I can show you her grades…I have them posted over on the other side of the room.’ I simply zoomed the camera off of her daughter, and onto her grades across the room. I realized right then and there, that this was light years ahead of the speakerphone.”

Scott is Program Director for the Turnabout Teens/Stillwater Academy in Salt Lake, Utah. The program and Academy are responsible for caring for teenagers sent there by their parents from around the United States because they have gone astray. Turnabout/Stillwater Academy is a licensed treatment center designed to assist teenagers from 12–17 who come to the Academy with problems ranging from drug or alcohol abuse, anger, defiance, depression, through sexual misconduct, and even eating disorders. At any one time, Turnabout has between 40 and 50 teenagers in residence.

The teens get little time to relax. Each day starts out at 7 AM, with an extensive regimen of physical exercises, followed by group and individual therapy, capped off by a full day (3:00 PM to 8:00 PM) in classes. Based on the progress of the individual students, their intensive schedule is broken up with extracurricular activities, such as snowboarding, skiing, or “equestrian therapy.”

“We have a working ranch,” said Scott. “At the ranch, we have the teens working, taking care of the horses, learning ‘gentling’ or the gentle way to train a horse. In the old days, people ‘broke in’ new horses, tying them to a tree. Now you go through a process where you train the horse in a non-intrusive way, to gain their trust. It’s not dissimilar from the way we teach the kids to gain back the trust of their own parents.

“We also do parent counseling,” said Scott. “This is very much a family program. Parent’s can’t just drop their children off. At a minimum, they must be involved in a two-hour meeting each week.”

While about 12 of the parents are local, Turnabout Teens currently has 39 parents from all around the United States who participate in the meetings each week over a video link, using Viack’s Via3 E-meetings software. The parents come into meetings through a dozen windows that are projected on a large-screen display in the room where the counseling session is conducted. “The parents have the video in their homes,” said Scott. “The nice thing about Viack is they don’t have to pay for the transmission or for videoconferencing equipment. All they have to download is the video software, which we send them, and participate in the videoconference over their home PC using a headset, microphone, and a WebCam. They typically have DSL or a broadband cable link. Quite a few of the parents have the video set up on their home computer as well as on their computer at work, so they come in from work.”

The program handles an average of 40 to 50 youth at a time, with between 60 and 70 being handled in any year. The program is scheduled to be nine months long, but a student’s departure is based on level of achievement. The average stay is 14 months, with some staying in the program for three years.

While Turnabout Teens first used a video product called PalTalk, after making the transition from the speakerphone to video, they found the product too limiting. PalTalk was only effective for two or three participants at a time. Viack was suggested to them by someone who literally found the company on the Internet and recommended it based on its price. After the Viack software was installed, Viack sent over a customer support representative, who sat through several weeks of two-hour meetings between parents and teens and helped those at both ends learn how to use the product effectively.

“The video and audio is of such quality that the parents can even read their children’s body language and hear the nuances in their voices to understand exactly what they are saying,” said Scott.

I asked Scott, “What’s next?”

“I don’t see why you couldn’t do individual therapy this way,” said Scott. “I don’t see why you couldn’t have a therapist in their office and the client at a distance. The technology is that good. You can sit and have a conversation and not feel hampered by the technology.”

Here’s what I think

For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to convince you that there was a “consumer” videoconferencing market. Remember when I had my son Nicholas write for TeleSpan, pointing out all the kids who used video in their computer games?

Still don’t think this is a highly addressable market? Turnabout Teens’ fees run over $3,800 a month. The parents sending their kids there are paying this to get their children back. And with that as an incentive, they are now using videoconferencing every week, from their homes.

I did a little research with the assistance of Michael Behunin with Insight Pros, who has helped run camps similar to Turnabout Teens. Michael told me that there are about 900 such facilities around the United States, which are often referred to as “boot camps.” By his count, 250 are called “residential treatment centers,” 150 are termed “wilderness programs,” 300 are “boarding schools,” and the remaining 200 are military schools. Depending on their size, each treats between 26 and 300 teenagers at any one time. That’s a sizable market.

In the business videoconferencing market, we cheer for a month after we spend a year selling only 100,000 group videoconferencing systems. Well, for those of you out there, some of you “analysts” who keep pooh-poohing the consumer video market, maybe you didn’t see the press release issued by Logitech this week. Logitech has just shipped its 25th million WebCam!

That’s a lot of consumer video, I’d say!

Special thanks to Kelly Wanlass, who worked with me for two days to get on Scott Jones’s busy calendar, so I could complete this story.

Scott Jones (scott@turnaboutteens.org)
Michael Behunin (michael@insightpros.com)
Kelly Wanlass (kelly@wanlass.com)
Karen Hoskins (karen_hoskins@logitech.com)

Reprinted from the March 7, 2005 issue of Electronic TeleSpan, with permission.

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