Talking Video

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

I am placing here a bunch of 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.

This time, the roundup is mostly about Vidtel.

They decided to give several bloggers a taste of their service, and the good reviews were not late to arrive:

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.

A press release I bumped into the other day, about Siracom's UniData WiFi Videophone, set to launch at CeBIT (that's like yesterday), got me thinking --- What a cool idea!

We already have mobile phones with video telephony embedded into them. Many Smartphones today already support WiFi. And we also have a bunch of WiFi phones (mainly for enterprises). So why not a WiFi videophone?

Have you noticed this new trend of "connected TV"?

It showed up at CES in full force, with every TV manufacturer out there having its own version of a television that connects to the internet - showing YouTube videos, latest news, stock market tickers or even your collection of photos out of Flickr or Picasa.

Chris Albrecht at NeeTeeVee  questions this evolution step:

How much of the Internet do you want on your television?

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".

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: