“Once the economy begins to recover, videoconferencing will see meteoric growth,” BT’s Videoconferencing Unit general manager Jeff Prestel told us in a recent interview. In the mean time growth is respectable, experience quality is improving, systems are easier to use, and high-end “immersive” solutions are creating a lot of buzz–although not making major inroads just yet. Collaborating with our colleague John Bartlett, we learned this and more during recent interviews with eight carriers to create this four-part “Guide to Videoconferencing Services”.
Several carriers told us that consumer experiences with Skype on the low end and HDTV on the high end are driving the adoption of videoconferencing for business. Corporate IT types as well as ordinary network users are dabbling in the technologies at home, allowing them to envision their workplace potential. Eager to capitalize on this trend, carriers are busily ramping up videoconferencing services.
Videoconferencing was once the private purview of Polycom and Tandberg, but that changed when Cisco introduced a sexy telepresence solution in 2007. The Cisco offering validated the market in carriers’ eyes–with Cisco serious about videoconferencing, carriers took notice.
Videoconferencing is a natural area of expansion for carriers who are hungrily stalking opportunities to add value and sell more bandwidth. Not only does videoconferencing provide a reason to sell more bandwidth, it also requires QoS for which carriers can charge a premium. Another factor nudging carriers down the videoconferencing path is the fact that trusted vendor partner Cisco is making it easy for them to enter the market.
Videoconferencing service types
Like tourist, business, and first class airline tickets, business videoconferencing services come in three basic classes: desktop videoconferencing, room-based videoconferencing, and “immersive” telepresence. Just as with airline classes, experience quality improves the more you pay.
Desktop videoconferencing allows users to see and hear each other on demand using a PC. Skype is an example of poor man’s desktop videoconferencing. The video image is usually tiny, grainy, and jumpy, and the audio is unpredictable–but who can complain about the price?
Room-based videoconferencing systems enable conference participants to physically convene in conference rooms equipped with dedicated videoconferencing gear and interconnect via a shared IP data network. BT’s Jeff Prestel calls room-based videoconferencing services the “meat and potatoes of the market”. Like conventional conference rooms, videoconference rooms must be reserved in advance, but scheduling is a bigger challenge because rooms must be reserved at each participating location.
The user experience quality for room-based systems depends on choosing the right technology and implementing it well. A well designed and executed solution can provide an excellent experience, but getting room-based video systems to work well has been hard and lots of users have not used them because the experience was too frustrating. The recent introduction of HD-quality video and much larger plasma or LCD screens has changed the quality equation, breathing new life into room-based deployments.
The immersive videoconferencing experience is to room-based videoconferencing what analog TV viewing is to iMax theater. The goal of immersive videoconferencing is to provide sufficiently powerful audio and visual effects to make you feel like you are actually with remote participants. Achieving this takes a lot of sophisticated and pricey equipment connected to a carefully designed network because the technology demands constant high-quality transport with extremely low loss and jitter.
Stay tuned for future postings in which we will describe the videoconferencing services you can buy from carriers.
