IP Video Conundrum

[img]http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u139/gtroyal/telepresence.jpg[/img] Cisco is all over the latest bandwidth sucking technology, that is Video and it’s various manifestations such as Video Conferencing, short form video (you tube) and Telepresence. This was the theme of John Chamber’s keynote at NXTComm this week. (You can watch it here.). Aside from the fact that I always have found John Chambers speeches as too polished (I have been to a lot of Cisco conferences), I have found that although the underlying premise is correct, it has always been cast as a revolution instead of an evolution of technology. What I mean by that is I remember the speech given about IP Telephony and VoIP. I remember Chambers telling the telcos that TDM was coming to an end, and IP was the future. That was at Cisco Networkers, February 1998. 9 Years on that assertion was true, but it has taken almost a decade to be delivered. The same with IP video. Although no one disagrees that video is the future, it is also only a future to high speed synchronous broadband users. The future is going to take longer than you think. But isn’t this always the case?