Last week, Larry had the chance to attend an analyst briefing about IPTV from Cisco in a Cisco TelePresence center and found the experience delightful, especially when compared to the standard analyst phone briefing – and a much better experience compared with traveling across country for a few-hours-meeting. Cisco first released its TelePresence solution last October.

The picture and sound quality were superb. Larry could read the local time on the presenter’s wrist watch (on one of three HDTV monitors) while sitting across a conference table about 8 feet away.

The room was set up so Current Analysis employees were sitting on one side of the table and speaking with Cisco participants who looked and sounded like they were across the other side of the table; if fact the two “halves” of the table were actually located in Herndon, Va., and in San Jose, Calif. According to the Cisco’s original announcement, the quality image was achieved by using HD cameras, encoding/decoding, and monitors set at 1080p. The bandwidth required to run the session was 10Mbps to 14Mbps.

Participants at the distant location were “life size”, and the audio followed them as they walked around the room. The PowerPoint presentation originated from the distant location and was projected onto a screen locally when the distant presenter plugged in his laptop. The meeting room set up and tear down were accomplished with a “one touch” button on a Cisco IP phone located in the conference room; the scheduling for conference room activation was set-up when the meeting organizer booked the room and participants with a Microsoft Outlook meeting invitation.

Only two things missing that Larry could observe. Participants couldn’t shake hands in person, and they had to exchange business cards electronically instead of across the table. Otherwise, a very pleasant way to get the latest on Cisco’s IPTV portfolio.

Disclaimer: Larry’s opinion is his own, and it is not meant to be a Current Analysis endorsement of the Cisco TelePresence solution over other alternatives.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.