TiVo'ing Conference Calls

An IDC study sponsored by Nortel found that 16 percent of the global information work force is already hyperconnected, and that another 36 percent are poised to join them soon.

One interesting result is that more than 1 in 3 business users would like to be able to "TiVo" their conference calls.

TiVo, if you are not familiar with it, is a subscription service, that can bring you all your favorite TV shows, ready to watch whenever you want and wherever you are. It's a Digital Video Recorder, effectively a disk-based VCR, which can connect to the Internet, to deliver movies to your PC, laptop or Netbook and video, music, photos, and more--right to your TV.

So what is on these business users' wish lists?

Simply, they want the ability to pause, fast forward, store or even select individual speakers and capture parts of the call as "actions" or "notes".

I can see the value of this.

What's needed is a holistic integration service for audio conferencing, telepresence and desktop video conferencing, web collaboration and webcasting services. Nortel, among others, is stepping up to the bar.