April 2009 Archives

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.

Visual communication is a different thing in different markets, with the consumers being the "late adopters" in this case. While this might be true, as we're still in the early adoption stages of these technologies/services, it is probably all about to change in 2009.

Living in Israel, I wasn't exposed to any videophone ad on TV, but there have been a few in the US, which were targeted consumers directly.

Here are some I bumped into following twitter:

As you can see, Skype are doing a great job showing off how video conversations on a PC can look like. It goes to show how HD can really liven up a video conversation. However, the great part about this ad is definitely the music.

This one comes from Cisco, who is trying to move their Telepresence story to the consumer space. Continue Reading...

This might sound like an April fool's joke to some, but it really isn't: we've got a new class of phones (and screens), and someone decided to give it the (boring) name "Media Phone".

In-Stat even taken the liberty of writing a report on media phones. (free!). It is touting the media phone as "our 4^th screen", after the PC, the TV and the mobile handset. I don't believe in a 4^th screen paradigm, but that's for another post.

So what IS a "media phone"? The way I see it:

• Something with an LCD display of about 7" (or more)
• Something that can do more than just voice calls

OpenPeak's OpenFrame

I'll add to that that "Something with video capabilities (especially the communication part of it)".

Here are some highlights from the In-Stat promotion:

• Consumer media phones will generate between $4-$8 Billion in annual revenue, worldwide, by 2013.
• Business media phones will generate $3.3 Billion in annual revenue, worldwide, in 2013.
• The US media phones market will open up in 2009, with Europe coming on board in 2010.

Media phones are being released by all the leading vendors. Continue Reading...