Following our recent coverage of video over IP and telepresence, we heard in a follow-up interview from Bob Romano, VP of Marketing at Radvision, about progress to make different video systems interoperable. Radvision is a leading provider of products and technologies for unified visual communications over IP and Romano is an industry veteran. Our discussions focused on Scalable Video Codec (SVC) technology and the ongoing role of the Multipoint Control Unit (MCU); the MCU is a device used to bridge videoconferencing connections.

Standards for H.264 SVC codec extensions have been ratified, while the SIP signaling and RTP transport for SVC is in the process of design and ratification, according to Romano. SVCs help with improved error resiliency and will eventually replace transcoding MCUs with software, although Romano contends that the elimination of MCUs can only be fully realized in homogenous SVC deployments. Romano believes that until SVCs become homogenous, the MCU will continue to play an important role in connecting telepresence systems and IP video conferencing, including those that can support H.263, H.264, and H.264 SVC.

Our observations: Like VoIP systems that frequently need gateways to connect between disparate systems or networks so too do telepresence systems need a gateway function to interoperate with desktop video, remote locations, and different video over IP conference systems. And like VoIP, maybe before we retire we’ll see the day when SIP / IMS and network-based software systems provide full service interworking. But in the meantime, we agree with Romano that gateway functionality between multi-vendor and multi-generational video systems is inevitable.

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