UC
The video industry’s premier event, InfoComm, take place in Las Vegas this week. As usual, the event features a slew of new announcements from leading video conferencing vendors as well as startups and emerging players. A few of the more interesting announcements include: Vidyo’s announcement of 1440p capable video systems, as well as a new program featuring free multipoint connectivity to encourage users of legacy equipment to migrate to Vidyo rather than expand existing systems Teliris’ home telepresence solution featuring full-size video conferencing capable of running over broadband Internet connections and its new 3-D telepresence solution Radvision’s ability to integrate iPad into multiparty video conferences Cisco/Tandberg’s new rich desktop client and expanded interoperability for both internal and external conferencing Polycom’s new immersive telepresence room system using its “high profile” codec to reduce bandwidth requirements These announcements highlight the rapid growth of the video conferencing market driven by increasing enterprise demand. We’ve just completed data gathering and analysis from more than 200 end-user organizations and the results are stunning. More than 82% of companies are now using some form of video conferencing. While room-based systems still dominate, almost 80% are using or planning to use desktop video, while more than half are using or planning to use immersive telepresence. As I’ve noted before in this blog, we’re in the middle of a “perfect storm” with respect to video. Prices continue to fall, demand continues to grow to leverage video to both reduce travel costs and improve collaboration for an increasingly distributed virtual workforce, and video acceptance continues to grow thanks to consumer video solutions such as Skype. But all of these announcements also underscore continued challenges related to interoperability, not to mention the increasingly difficult task of picking the right vendor and solution from an ever increasing menu of options. One of the key trends we’ve noted is integration of video into unified communications, meaning that those who still approach video as a stand-alone solution need to change their thinking and instead work with the UC planning team to determine the ideal integration strategies. We also see growing challenges around interoperability as vendors adopt different approaches to minimizing bandwidth and improving error correction over unreliable networks. For example, Vidyo, Radvision, and their partners (Teliris, ShoreTel, etc.) rely on H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) to deliver high-quality video over services such as the public Internet or 3G wireless. Microsoft (and its partners) have their own proprietary video codec (RTvideo). Meanwhile Polycom expands its High Profile codec which it claims cuts bandwidth demands in half. Cisco/Tandberg don’t support either of these approaches yet, meaning additional transcoding and gateways to enable interoperability. And now Vidyo’s aggressive pricing scheme means that video conferencing planners have a new option for expansion that could significantly reduce deployment costs. Video is hot these days. All of these announcements should be reason enough for those responsible for video conferencing planning to take a fresh look at their options and assumptions.
