Video conferencing in a business environment, so far, meant going into a dedicated meeting room fitted with panning cameras and monitors or making do with the jittery low quality images of a Skype type of connection. That is set to change dramatically with the announcement of an all-software based video conferencing system. The software is delivered from the cloud and will permit videoconferencing to become possible, not just between people using computers but also those with mobile phones and tablets. This is of great significance in today’s work environment where getting a group of relevant people together at one place for a discussion is a major scheduling challenge. Vidyo Inc. is a 120 people technology start-up based in Hackensack, New Jersey with $ 97 million venture capital funding. It entered into a relationship with HP in 2010 to bundle its virtual telepresence software with its business computers.
The launched
The VidyoRouter was demonstrated in early November by conferencing 100 geographically dispersed locations and using various endpoint devices. The participants agreed that the experience was indistinguishable from a hardware based video conference. Commercial launch in planned in early 2012.
The VidyoRouter does away with the MCU ( multipoint control Unit) hardware that was previously needed for videoconferencing. It builds on the H.264 SVC protocol that was invented by Vidyo Inc. to continuously adjust the video signal to match the network quality and the response of the endpoint devices. The elimination of the hardware interface makes the VidyoRouter independent of location. For example, a single licence in a global enterprise can be used by different geographies at different times.
Functionality
The single enterprise licence is expected to be priced at $17,000. The MCU for a hardware based video conference unit for a single location costs about $13,000 and if the average number of locations for a corporate user is taken as four, the new VidyoRouter should displace the MCU from corporate video conferencing budgets. With the elimination of the hardware interface, the time taken to set up a video conferencing facility also drops to the few minutes needed to download the software.
The virtualization also permits service providers to provide video conferencing facilities in the same manner as they now provide audio conferencing. The software is independent of the computer hardware or the computing platform. The VidyoRouter is compatible with Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS and iOS that covers most endpoint devices. The VidyoRouter will be hosted on the Amazon Web Services and the call charges could be as low as 0.3 cents a minute. This is a big reduction from the present call rates which are in several dollars a minute due to the need for service providers to provide hardware interfaces for each user.
This virtualization of the media stream is as path breaking as VMWare’s work on the compute plane that has led to the creation of data centers where companies now store enterprise data, doing away with investments in large data servers. The cost and complexity of upgrading servers and software for video conferencing will shift from the user enterprise to the service provider.
What to expect
With software based video capability, some proponents go so far as to say video calls will become as commonplace as e-mails in a corporate environment. HP already has a relationship with Vidyo to bundle its telepresence software on its business computers. That could get extended to the VidyoRouter software so that it is part of the business software suite.
The greatest impact of this new technology will be scalability. Present videoconferencing technology gets limited to a few hundred locations with the compatible hardware. With virtualization, theoretically there is no limit.
What not to expect
Videoconferencing has long been hyped as the means to cut back on corporate travel to meetings. That hope has never been delivered for various reasons. People still appear to need the eye contact and the reading of body language and nonverbal communication to get a full sense of other people’s comfort and involvement in a discussion. People also appear to be inhibited when they are in a video conference as the images could be taped and the replayed out of context. These factors would continue to apply with the new technology.
Wrap up
The VidyoRouter is clearly a game changer for the video conference industry. This development will put pressure on Vidyo’s competition including Cisco, Polycom and Logitech who have attempted to build in various hardware components into a single platform, with the result that the platform costs have climbed to over $ 300,000 per location.
With the virtualization that Vidyo has achieved, the expectation is that corporates, in future, would just subscribe for the service in the manner that we currently subscribe to a mobile phone service. Once such services become commonplace and cost effective, many new applications should come up including tele-medicine, collaborative work spaces and virtual classrooms with real time interaction possible.
