Talking Video

Sometimes Voice Is All You Need

2009-11-18T09:36:52Z

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. It got bloated to the point where it was impossible to implement and deploy over networks, which made a lot of VoIP technologists skeptical about it. I know, as I have been one of them for a long time now. But I think it is changing.

IMS is taking a different approach now, at least from the looks of this initiative, by first focusing on the "simple" stuff of doing regular voice calls and adding text messaging to it; instead of promising the world. From there, it can grow in a more controlled fashion to live up to the dreams that were made around it.

In the words of a good colleague of mine: "they are now investing in 90% of the revenue they are generating, which requires only 10% of the effort".

For me it's a wakeup call, that sometimes all we actually need is "just" voice.

Video Roundup: Video Conferencing Hype

2009-09-30T12:46:09Z

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.

Video Conferencing: It's Not About Preference

2009-09-23T10:54:00Z

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...

... face-to-face meetings are much better than meeting in any other way.

The thing that people mostly miss when they dismiss video conferencing as a means for better communications is that it isn't here to replace face-to-face meetings - it is here to improve communications when you can't meet face-to-face.

If the choice was flying twice a month to the other side of the globe for a 2-days synchronization meetings or conducting an hourly video conferencing call each day of the month - which one would you prefer?

For me it would be the video conferencing alternative, for sure. And I say it as someone who flies quite often.

I don't like flying. I don't like the wasted time that it involves. I don't like being away from home for too long. I don't like missing the smile of my baby girl every morning.

I prefer meeting face-to-face. Always. But without the traveling part that it requires.

So video conferencing is not a matter of what kind of communication type do you prefer. It's a matter of what other alternatives you really have.

Is Innovation Required for Video Conferencing or is it The Applications That Need to be Innovative?

2009-09-16T13:31:11Z

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. It is time we stop selling it as "just" a communication means to enterprises. Video conferencing should be embedded in a lot more applications and verticals. Education is one such vertical; Health care is another one. But there are many others which can enjoy the benefits of video conferencing, if we would only take the time to integrate it properly and find the right use cases.

There are misconceptions about video conferencing, even today:

I am in perpetual arguments with people who state that point-to-point video conferencing is useless and irrelevant. Not needed. Un-natural. Tell that to my mother who forced me years ago to purchase a webcam, just so she can speak with me on Skype. And I only live 30 minutes away.
People argue that video conferencing isn't required to replace face-to-face calls, since HD Voice can replace it at lower costs. So how do you explain companies who use video conferencing on a daily basis for internal meetings between branch offices and swear they could never exist without it?
Others say that video doesn't add anything on top of voice and that it even diminishes the communications experience. And still people, a lot of people, use video.

If we just provide video conferencing as a building block, instead of a whole service, we could let smart people like Robert Cringely find ways to use it, let others mesh it up with other functionalities and use it as they like.

So is innovation necessary in video conferencing the building block or should it lay in the way people use it to build their own application logic around it?

What Will be the Next Innovation in Video Conferencing?

2009-09-09T12:22:45Z

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.

Upload Streams and Other Video Calling Hurdles

2009-07-29T14:55:01Z

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. If service providers begin to address the issue of increasing upstream bandwidth, it can lead the way to a lot more use of video calling (as well as other video services) by consumers. As Stacey rightly puts it:

... there's [...] an opportunity to offer products and services that take advantage of consumers' willingness and potential ability to upload larger files. Posting keyboard cat videos or even video conferencing is just the beginning.

The only problem is that bandwidth isn't the only obstacle. There's also the issue of latency: if the delay between sender and receiver is too high (think hundreds of milliseconds high), visual communication (video calling included) will be rendered useless.

My only hope is that ISPs will take into account the latency issue as well, allowing us all to enjoy better real-time services over the internet in the comfort of our homes.

Niche Apps Driving Video Calling Adoption?

2009-07-01T12:23:12Z

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. It's the fact that you can now call people, see them, move on from there to sharing data and interacting in ways you couldn't before, especially when done across businesses - that's the real deal behind video conferencing.

So yeah - video calling is not replacing phone calls; instead it is going to be used an innovative and more effective way to communicate,, where it will makes sense to add video. Garrett calls it "niche applications", while I prefer to call it "communications services". The whole package offers various options to make communicating as efficient and effective as possible.

Logitech Vid: Not Your Typical Video Calling Service

2009-06-25T14:38:45Z

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. That person needs also to be a SightSpeed user (a company Logitech purchased a while back). To me this sounds like... another user account, in yet another social network/calling service. Of course, if the person you want to call isn't on SightSpeed, you can send him an invitation. How novel!

Liz Gannes from NeeTeeVee has an interesting point as to what Logitech is trying to achieve with this wait-they-seriously-didn't-have-this-already? service:

...Vid isn't measuring its success by wide appeal; rather, the service is meant to sell more webcams. Users who don't have a Logitech webcam - perhaps they're just using a built-in camera - or don't know someone who already uses the service (and can thus invite them) can only use it for a 30-day trial before buying a Logitech device of their own. There's not even an option to pay more to keep using Vid with another webcam.

My 5 cents?

This service isn't going to work. It's relatively simple and easy to use, but so is the rest of the competition out there.
This service isn't going to work. It's way easier to sign up for a "real" video calling service, such as Vidtel, and use a "real" device instead of mucking around with software apps and web cams.
On a brighter note: visual communications is happening. Logitech's recent moves - the purchase of SightSpeed and now Vid - are just more signs for this shift in the market.

Video for the Masses: Now in Enterprise Edition

2009-06-17T13:26:24Z

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. Almost everyone is using video. It started by watching videos online, uploading them to UGC websites, such as YouTube or Flickr, and its exploded with everyone using Skype or Gtalk video calling.

But what about the B2B world? The place where visual communications started. But how many businesses can afford a 'personal' video system that starts at $5,000. Video calling is still a niche, adopted by early adopters and avid CEOs. Well, all this is about to change. Dramatically.

We now have the capabilities necessary for HD visual communications to be on every employee's desktop - every employee of the enterprise. We are tearing down the walls of the conferenceing rooms. That's why I believe these services are actually going to be used a lot more.

This has been a busy week for RADVISION and for the industry in general, with InfoComm 09 happening in Olrando. Stephen Lawson, from IDG, covered press releases issued by RADVISION (my company) and LifeSize this week, noting the different approaches we're taking in bringing video calling to the desktop:

LifeSize Communications and Radvision are taking two different routes toward high-definition desktop videoconferencing, both aiming to bring more participants into the virtual room. [...]

The LifeSize Desktop application is designed for use on standard Windows XP and Vista systems, including laptops, particularly for employees who work at home or on the road. [...]

Radvision and Samsung bypassed the CPU power question altogether, while allowing users to integrate their desktop videoconferencing systems with their PCs physically. The VC240 is a 24-inch Samsung high-definition PC monitor with a built-in DSP (digital signal processor) for videoconferencing.

As a side note, I would add that RADVISION is actually offering both of the options that Stephen is discussing - offloading the video codec when working with the VC240, and using the PC CPU for the codec with our SCOPIA Desktop client.

Bottom line:

Visual communication is booming both in the consumer market and in the enterprise because it is making it accessible two different target audiences. For consumers, that will mean having both software based solutions, that can be installed on personal computers, AND consumer electronic appliances, that can do video calls (standalone videophones, embedded in the television, or any other technique).
For businesses, that will mean having both desktop solutions (in a form of LCD, a standalone videophone or a software application) AND dedicated room systems.

Susan Boyle Effect on Video Calling

2009-05-07T12:42:16Z

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. That's 520,000 gigabytes or the equivalent of maxing-out in a single week the monthly bandwidth allotment of 260 co-lo servers at Rackspace.com. Running at top speed for a week would require 1040 such servers to do the job and we haven't even made it to a week yet. That's 520 million-million bytes.

As a VoIP person, the first thing that came to my mind was: how does that fit with visual communications?

We're all hearing about HD Video these days, and how it will bring video telephony/conferencing/communications to the masses. But what will happen if that REALLY does become a reality?

A quick search got me to this small tidbit: in 2006 international voice traffic was almost 500 billion minutes. That's 500,000,000,000 minutes. That's 41 billion minutes a month (or should I say 951,293 concurrent calls?).

Now let's do the math:

Let's assume that only 1% of all calls are video calls. As I've stated in the past, video calling is not here to replace face-2-face meetings or voice calls. 1% is quite conservative, considering that Skype stated that 28% of their calls are video.

1% means 416 million minutes a month.

For HD video let's assume a bandwidth of 1Mbps (125,000 kilobits per second).

That will bring us to 52,000 gigabytes, only 10% of the bandwidth Susan Boyle brought in a single week.

You should note that there's still a big difference between VoIP (that's Video over IP) calls and YouTube content (or any streaming content for that matter). Communications are not static - they're dynamic. You can't store this video on local servers or use CDN architectures. Every bit needs to be sent over the network, across the globe if necessary. This means that traffic is much more chaotic, and you can't really optimize it.

Just think what will happen if, god forbid, video will account for more than those lousy 1% of international calls?

One thing is sure - the guys on the plumbing (Cisco, for instance) would LOVE this to happen. They will be one of the main benefactors if and when this becomes reality.

Welcome To SIP, Video Surveillance

2009-04-30T11:07:48Z

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:

The closed proprietary ones, where everything is done with some obscure protocol.
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. They also use bi-directional audio, so the security guys can shout at perpetrators, if and when they see them.

As our lives get more digitized (and more complex), I believe everything needs to become interactive and multi-directional. RTSP, as a single direction media protocol just isn't the right choice anymore for surveillance. It's good to see that the industry is heading towards SIP on this one.

3 screens, 4 screens - Why Are We Counting Screens?

2009-04-23T12:28:13Z

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. Some, many, of these items already have screens on them. And a lot of them are either supporting WiFi or will support in the next couple of years. So why stick with an "n screen" paradigm, when a lot of our "stuff" is going to be connected and have a screen pretty soon?

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at this faucet:

Smartfaucet for emails (via LikeCOOL)

This may be your 5^th screen...

Video Roundup: Video Conferencing Hype

2009-04-23T12:23:10Z

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. (Yeah, yeah. I know you heard it before...)
Robert X. Cringely discusses Susan Boyle's performance on "Britain's Got Talent". What I liked most was the bandwidth calculation - just think what will happen when video becomes a communication means for the masses.
Unlike me, Rich Tehrani, TMCnet's President, believes that the year of videoconferencing came and went (2008, that is). I must admit he might be more than correct. Video conferencing is already here to stay, so why wait for t to be a part of our lives when to many it already is?
Telepresence in space. That's what was on Slashdot this week. For those not convinced enough that video conferencing is going to be everywhere one day.
Our own Sagee Ben Zedeff breaks the story of RADVISION's SVC-based video conferencing solution.

Video Calling Going Prime Time

2009-04-09T15:16:15Z

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. They have a Telepresence ad for the enterprise space as well.

The Celebrity Apprentice show had the ACN videophone featured in it, which caused my twitter searches to be spammed with MLMers of this videophone.

A bit lame on technology, but goes to show how video calling is being pushed to consumers: Oprah Winfrey surprises Ellen DeGeneres with a video telephone call during taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The thing to notice here is the use of the term "Skyping In", and in the context of a video call.

5LINX got this TV spot to promote their videophone service. It shows what you can do with video today at low bandwidths, with SD resolution of course.

2009 may seem like the year of the videophone to some - at least to those of us who work at the video communication industry for several years already. I believe the year of the videophone will be 2010, when you'll start seeing some real cool products going out to consumers with higher resolutions and higher video quality.

A 4th Screen To Follow? Introducing The Media Phone

2009-04-01T11:52:36Z

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. The best ones, which aren't even covered in the In-Stat report, have been show-cased during CES last month.

My take on the whole "media phone" trend?

Videophones and visual communication is here to stay. And grow.
Media phones are best served with SIP. Adding H.323 to them is nice to have, and may be beneficial for current deployments of video, but SIP is where the action will be.
Media phones are targeted mainly at the SMB and consumer markets, where video conferencing didn't penetrate much yet.
Media phones are not our 4^th screen. They are our new home/desk phones.
These kinds of devices have the capability of dramatically increase the visual communication market (the other growth opportunity is the desktop of course).