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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.

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. In this segment, I also include medium-sized enterprises who are multi-national. This is the segment where RADVISION, for example, is dominant today.

This market segment is focused on connecting colleagues working in different branches of the enterprise to one another. You won't see a lot (if any) calls done between enterprises.

Most deployments tend to be focused on the organization itself, with its IT or communication department taking care of managing the infrastructure itself.

The types of video endpoints you'll see here will be mainly room systems - located in designated meeting rooms, equipped with a large TV and a camera, connected to a video terminal.

Lately you can see more desktop solutions being deployed alongside the room systems in such organizations - like our very own SCOPIA Desktop. These allow employees to use video calling from their desktops.

This segment is all about high definition these days, and the higher the better.

Small and medium businesses

SMBs, for me, are single office enterprises. They have no real need for video conferencing within the organization besides teleworking, as the rest of the staff is located in the same place. They can, however, use video conferencing to communicate with customers, suppliers and partners.

Most SMBs would probably prefer to have this as a hosted service, with the server located elsewhere and a minimal set of equipment being either purchased or leased for use on site.

In these deployments, 7" videophones and desktop based solutions would work best, if you want to deploy a solution for the employee's desks, while a single room system will be more than enough.

This is a new market altogether, with new video-centric service providers leading the way.

Consumers

Surprisingly enough the consumer market already exists today, and I dare to say it's the biggest of them all. It consists mainly of peer-to-peer video calling using services such as Skype Google Talk.

Today this segment is PC-centric, but for it to really grow, it needs to encompass consumer electronics: migrate from the PC/software domain to hardware-based/entertainment goods, such as videophones, TV sets,set-top boxes, etc.

I would like to draw your attention to two webinars that may be of your interest.

Title: Improving Video Quality in Your Network - Pre and post deployment network assessment of video quality.

Who: RADVISION (my company)

Description: While video deployment is experiencing a significant boom both in enterprise and carrier networks, overall user experience does not always live up to the expectations. RADVISION experts will discuss how to avoid this pitfall through pre and post deployment network assessment of video quality.

I admit that this one is a bit of a shameless self-promotion of a webinar by my company, but I believe the content is highly important to our industry and my readers.

Where: subscribe to RADVISION's free webinar.

Title: The Videoconferencing Market - Challenges and Possibilities Ahead

Description: Principal Analyst, Roopam Jain, has completed an extensive analysis on the Videoconferencing market. The research expert will lead a short teleconference about new findings that affect the market, followed by a live question and answer session.

Roopam Jain nails down the adoption challenges of video conferencing in the enterprise. This is a great webinar if you're relatively new to video conferencing, and the Q&A section is good as well.

When: Two weeks ago... (March 4, 11am EST)

Where: To see this past webinar, just go to the registration page and fill it in. You will be able to access the webinar immediately.

I've meant to write about downloadable VoIP Clients for a long time now, but didn't quite know how to tackle the issue. I finally wrote about it on my VoIP Survivor blog, stating I don't see the value of having downloadable VoIP clients in mobile application stores. However, there's an additional aspect that needs to be tackled, and that is video.

I'll start by quoting Morten Hjerde on the fragmentation on development platforms:

"... if you intend to interact with the phone itself - if your app uses the camera, the GPS, or any other internal phone feature - you are back to developing a separate app per manufacturer...the dream of cross platform development seems further away than ever. Maybe forever."

Video requires all of the above and more. Video is also much harder than voice. It requires more processing power and it usually requires optimization on the target platform in order to run smoothly. Furthermore, it requires interaction with a lot of peripherals.

This makes it quite impossible to make it downloadable on a large scale.

I was the Product Manager of the 3G-324M stack in RADVISION up until recently - a protocol stack that is used for mobile video calls from handsets. In this capacity I had the pleasure of working with a lot of handset vendors. If there's anything that this experience has taught me it is that mobile devices are different from each other to the extreme. Some use the latest NVIDIA graphic accelerators just to get better visualization while others are looking for something that can run off a low cost ARM7 for their device.

For an operator to support a downloadable client, he must have that client running off multiple devices. Almost every device will need its own optimization for the video codecs - without it, you simply can't run video encoding off of the device; at least not today, when real time video encoding is not widespread.

Each and every handset vendor we worked with had to work out the optimization and integration part of the video codec into his system - quite a tedious task.

As much as it would have been nice to have a downloadable video client, it simply can't be. At least not today. It must be integrated into the phone itself. Tailoring into each and every handset is impractical.

Andy Abramson stated recently, once again, that video conferencing will take off in 2009:

I've been saying that IP based video conferencing will be taking off in 2009 and it looks like I'm right with that prediction.

NASA and Verizon have reworked their agreements and now will have IP based video and web conferencing supplied by the Baby Bell.

I must say that I believe Andy is correct. It was not that apparent at CES that video is happening, but it was there - in the fringes. It is happening on desktops already and it is gaining popularity in enterprises as well.

Vidtel launched a video telephony service, and now, another service provider called GlobalLinx is reported to join the fray.

Add to these Creative's Broadxent subsidiary and you get a brave new world of video centric service providers.

Video is definitely happening.

They call it talking heads for a reason.

Video chat will never be the same for me.

Found this one at Carl Tyler's blog.

Hi there.

My name is Tsahi Levent-Levi and I work as a Product Manager at RADVISION. Here, I also write a blog called "VoIP Survivor" as part of RADVISION's company blogs.

When I was approached by Greg Galitzine with the offer of having my own blog on the TMCnet blog network, there was no real debate on whether or not to accept the offer - it was just a matter of choosing the right topic. During the past 10 years at RADVISION, I've been working on various technologies - IP and 3G, both signaling and media related, and as a developer and a product manager.

Finally, I eventually decided to focus on video telephony technologies, a topic which I find to be both interesting and "hot", a topic that is set to change the way we communicate.

A name was therefore chosen - "Talking Video", and this is exactly what I will be doing here: Talking Video.

I'll try writing here once a week, publishing a post every Wednesday, so stay tuned.

I'd appreciate any comments or questions you might have.

See you soon,

Tsahi