Talking Video

There is a lot of value in doing things from the browser:

• You don't need to download a thing
• Theoretically, it works across operating systems
• Theoretically, it works for PCs as well as mobile handsets
• You can "widgetize" it and deploy it across multiple sites, mesh it up with other data services, etc.

There is a lot of talk these days about the real-time web: instant updates, instant notifications, instant everything. But, for some reason, this real-timeliness isn't about bi-directional video. You can do something close by streaming video in both directions, but it won't be the same.

The way I see it, the problem is that we're just now getting to the point where video telephony is suitable for use over the internet. With increasing processing power and bandwidth, but also with new innovations around video itself - for instance, the use of SVC to improve video quality.

But we're only just beginning to deal with video communications properly, and it is going to take time for the adoption and standardization to reach a stage where we can integrate it into the browser. Continue Reading...

Last week we held the RADVISION Unified Communication Summit in Tel-Aviv. I was tasked with giving a key-note presentation on social media, and decided to look at it from an inter-personal communications perspective. These two concepts may seem very different, but my point was/is that they are set to meet, one way or another.

On one side you have the social media people, who are now regarded as cool and trendy. They tend to look down upon the "old" marketing tactics (from the '90s, that is), and they talk about how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the likes can help your company make millions with hardly any need for investment.

On the other side you have the unified communication people, all suited up and ready for their corporate daily work. Continue Reading...

While I am an avid user and proponent of video conferencing (to me this means all forms of visual communications), I don't believe it is going to replace voice calling - at least not all voice calls. As with other communications technologies, it will replace only part of the other means of communications.

You see - sometimes video is just not what we are looking for. Or at least it's not what is necessary to succeed.

This month a group of mobile operators and vendors unveiled an initiative called "One Voice". This initiative is about adopting IMS over LTE by focusing on doing only voice and SMS - what all mobile handsets are capable of doing these days.

I have written about it already on my VoIP Survivor blog and over at NoJitter, but there is one thing I have neglected: IMS started as a big promise - a promise of providing rich multimedia, along with rapid service creation and deployment by operators. Continue Reading...

I'll be placing here links once in a while of news items and blog posts that I find interesting and are related to visual communications.

If you have items you'd like to feature here - just email me at tsahil@radvision.com.

Here goes:

• Garrett Smith asks if video conferencing is over-hyped on VoIP Insider - no it isn't. I'd say it is quieter out there than it should be.
• If you are new to video conferencing, then Carol Skyring has a good starting point for you - her Videoconferncing: The Basics. It comes as a new series of posts or an ebook.
• China Unicom is reported to have started a fixed line video telephony service - good luck!
• Jack Loftus brings a videophone concept from 1910 on Gizmodo - did anyone patent it?
• Michael Graves provides interesting information about immersive audio - not really video, but reminded me a lot of 3D video communications. It's in our future, but will take time to get there.

 It is about time we stop pretending as if video conferencing is here to replace face-to-face meetings. Or that it gives a "life-like" experience, which will surely make airline companies redundant. As Rich Tehrani reports from a recent Forbes survey:

... executives still expressed an overwhelming preference for face-to-face meetings, with more than eight out of ten (84%) saying they prefer in-person contact to virtual...

...

I've been whining a bit about the lack of innovation in video conferencing in my RADVISION blog, and even took the time to suggest what the next innovation might be.

At the time of writing these posts, I haven't had the time to read Robert Cringely's post about the education system:

Education, which - along with health care - seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else.  We should have a marketplace for insight.  Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference.  Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached.  The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.

And this is just a quote. You should definitely read the whole post, especially the beginning of it, which is rather amusing.

The thing is, that his post got me thinking:

What if the innovation in video conferencing should not be in the technology or the service, but rather in the applications that people use?

Cisco Telepresence used in a class (commercial)

Maybe it's time to start thinking about video conferencing infrastructure (endpoints, bridges) as vehicles or enablers for other industries. The technology is mature enough and solid enough to take the next step. Continue Reading...

On my VoIP Survivor blog, I've been complaining about the lack of innovation in the video conferencing market.

I'd like to take this a jab at suggesting what can be the next innovation for the video conferencing market.

1. Connectivity between enterprises

It's no secret that video conferencing today is a niche where only large enough enterprises play. You need to have multiple locations around the world in order to utilize video calling. Why? Because there is no easy way today to "dial" calls between enterprise boundaries.

Our industry has created islands of video conferencing equipment - equipment that has no real problem of interoperating with each other, just a minor issue of being able to find each other over the network.

The company that will be able to take this problem and solve it, effectively being a global carrier of video telephony, will be a true innovator that will open the door for far better collaboration and communication between corporate partners, suppliers and customers.

It will make video conferencing a true B2B solution, instead of the B solution it is today.

2.

Last week Stacey Higginbotham reported on GigaOm about the coming upstream revolution:

Demand for upstream bandwidth is growing. Floyd Wagoner, a director of marketing and communications for Motorola Access Networks Solutions, said in an interview today that a U.S. cable provider has seen peak upstream bandwidth use increase by 24 percent from 2007 to 2008. The same provider saw average upstream bandwidth use increase by 17 percent.

While this demand didn't come from video conferencing (or at least not directly), it is important to note that video calling require a lot of bandwidth - both downstream and upstream: a typical 720p HD call, for instance, will take about 1 Mbps, upstream and downstream - a lot more than you have on your average ADSL contract.

While downstream bandwidths are rather decent, upstream bandwidths is one of the main reasons why quality video conferencing hasn't reached the masses and is left in the realm of corporate users. Continue Reading...

Garrett Smith, one of the smartest people writing about VoIP out there, had an interesting post a few weeks ago, about the use of video calling:

"Propelled by the "seeing is believing" phenomena, video phone calling is continuing to increase in popularity and usage.  It's growing adoption, however, is not being driven by traditional consumer calling (as one would think), but by niche applications."

Garrett also provides several examples of such niche applications - some of which I haven't known about until I read his post. While I don't refute the fact that video calling is used for a wide variety of niche applications, I think the analysis is a bit misleading.

I've discussed it here already, when I was analyzing whether  video telephony adoption is a matter of better user experience or more use cases. I still don't know the answer. But I think that video calling is not just a service - it's an enabler.

Our current communications options in regards to in-person communications, is quite varied: we can send snail mail (if we remember how this old technology work...), email, a fax, an instant message, a tweet, do a voice call, leave voicemail, do a video call, collaborate over the web, share our PC screen, etc.

Two way communication done right!

This means that we can now select the best means of communications for a given scenario: we won't be doing a voice call, if an instant message makes more sense, and we won't be using a voice call when seeing the other side is important for the task in hand.

As someone here at RADVISION told me this week, talking heads isn't really video conferencing. Continue Reading...

Logitech just launched a new service called Vid.

Essentially, it's an application Logitech is supplying along with the webcams they usually sell. Why? To sell more webcams, of course.

Their selling point for the service is all about simplifying the complex offering out there, that requires installing applications and managing user accounts (think Skype, ooVoo, etc.).

So if Logitech doesn't require you to have a user account, how do you actually connect with the person you want to talk to? Well, the Logitech logic says by email address. Everyone has one. But it's not that simple. Continue Reading...

The visual communication industry has been asleep for a long time. Too long, or so I'd like to think. No great progress has been made.

We've been playing around with room systems, telepresence and other high-end devices, trying - as an industry - to push it as a replacement to flight tickets. Our industry has finally grown, but too slowly.

As the technologies have improved, it seems like the time has come for our industry to wake up and see what's going on in the consumer market of visual communications. Continue Reading...

I've promised myself not to talk (or tweet) about Susan Boyle. But I just couldn't resist it, reading how Robert X. Cringely does the math on her YouTube video:

The video file as presented on YouTube is just over seven minutes and 26 megabytes long. Twenty million (and counting!) times 26 megabytes is 520 terabytes or approximately half the size of the Internet Archive. Continue Reading...

Video surveillance is one of those huge markets where standards aren't used enough. Though I am not an expert in video surveillance, I have been on the edges of this market and its requirements in the past several years.

During this time, I have seen only two types of surveillance systems:

1. The closed proprietary ones, where everything is done with some obscure protocol.
2. The hybrid ones, where camera links use proprietary protocols, but some gateway along the way is capable of converting it to a standard protocol.

The standard protocol of choice in this industry is RTSP - Real Time Streaming Protocol. It is basically a protocol defining a kind of a set-top box remote control, where you can "select a channel", "play" it and do some other tricks.

There are some who regard SIP as a better solution for RTSP (and I am among them). Grandstream just announced a set of SIP based H.264 IP video surveillance products.

In a nutshell, the Grandstream solution has surveillance cameras that use SIP signaling to stream video from the camera to a monitoring system somewhere. Continue Reading...

People have been talking about a "3 screens world" for a while now: the TV, the mobile phone and the PC. Now that media phones are sprouting around us, they are being touted as the 4^th screen. Should we continue to count the screens around us?

We live in a world of gadgets. Every other item we purchase today has a microprocessor built-in, capable of more than what personal computers were able to do a decade ago. Continue Reading...

I'll be placing here links once in a while of news items and blog posts that I find interesting and are related to visual communications.

If you have items you'd like to feature here - just email me at tsahil@radvision.com.

Here goes:

• Once in a while, I bump into an interesting question on LinkedIn. This one, about face-to-face meeting versus Telepresence has drawn a lot of interesting answers.
• Scott Wharton on IP Business News talks about video at VoiceCon. He has a similar impression as Amir Zmora had about the show. It seems like 2009 is going to be the year of the video.