Recently in Future of Video Category

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

Modeling the visual communication market has been on my mind for some time now. I think that, as all things in the world, it can be split into 3 segments:

• Large enterprises and organizations
• Small and medium businesses (SMBs)
• Consumers

All are emerging markets, with SMBs being the newest one. All are doing virtually the same thing - using video calls to communicate. And still they are quite different from one another in nature.

Large enterprises and organizations

This can easily be called the traditional video conferencing market. Continue Reading...

No.

Not all of them.

It's not that I don't believe in visual communications. After all, I am writing a blog titled "Talking Video". I just don't like the over-hyping our industry is going through with the economy downturn.

Yes - companies are reducing flights. Yes - they can gain from doing video calls instead. 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's a first batch:

• TELEPHONY Online that Verizon is planning to provide video conferencing service on their FiOS network "sometime this year". Bill Heilig from Verizon says "If you think about the full video-telephony program, we think it has to be on the TV, but it also has to be on the PC." I couldn't agree more that video telephony has to be on the TV.
• Garrett Smith, a VoIP blogger by heart, is now  to video (or a video believer). If you are not reading his blog - it's time you start. The fact that he is looking closer at video calling goes to show that video is catching on.
• Skype has released version 4.0 officially this month.