What Will be the Next Innovation in Video Conferencing?

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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. Public Internet

Doing video conferencing? You need a dedicated network for it.

You see, it's not a bandwidth issue. Or a latency one. Though both are painful problems, the main problem is packet loss.

The public Internet has no QoS. Most of the data traversing the Internet isn't sensitive to real time, and works just fine with packet loss, using retransmission mechanisms that are embedded into its main building block - TCP. Video (and audio) is different - it is a lot less sensitive to packet loss. To the extreme.

It means that today's video solutions in enterprises usually require renting high quality, fat pipes between sites - MPLS, where quality of service can be guaranteed. This is both expensive and complex to manage.

A solution that allows doing video calls through the "open" Internet will be true innovation.

3. Real integration with conference rooms

Another option is to focus on the conference room. Today's video conferencing room system units can be considered as an "add-on" to the room. Equipment that is there in the room, to be used when a video call is required.

What if someone took the time to redesign the video conferencing room system to be fully integrated into the conference room, to become an important part of it for most meetings that occur within that room?

This kind of innovation is essential for the growth of the room system segment in our video conferencing market.

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