Video conferencing on the desktop

Le Guiniec: New seamlessly integratable offerings will provide personal telepresence, with the channel lending a hand

A few years ago, video conferencing would undoubtedly have been a room option of some sort. It was seen as high end and niche, while video-to-the-desktop was a novel yet poor-quality consumer service.

Today this has all changed, with video conferencing going mainstream. Video conferencing has previously meant either:
• High-end telepresence rooms with low-latency and consistent picture quality alongside great interactivity for hundreds of thousands of pounds. You also needed a special multiprotocol label switching pipe for a few thousand more each month; or
• More affordable room systems capable of delivering video via a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) with poor interactivity.

According to Cisco, latency must be less than or equal to 250 milliseconds. Legacy room systems that require an MCU have noticeable and annoying latency.

There are players in the market that have worked out how to deliver the desktop experience for business, and the key is a better technical foundation.

What was required was a new architecture making use of the H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard, which allows telepresence-quality video to be delivered over the internet with less than 250 millisecond latency without an MCU.

Users of IP-based systems have been forced to put up with marginal performance, choppy frames, long delays, blurred motion and broken pictures for too long.

With the advent of H.264 SVC, video conferencing can deliver affordable higher-quality desktop experiences and greater deployment flexibility over general-purpose IP networks.

We can finally deliver what people have been looking for – video conferencing on the desktop over a standard internet line that is as easy to access as Skype, but with latency to rival a high-end telepresence room. They can be highly scalable in multipoint environments.

A market shift towards desktop video conferencing should increase opportunities for the channel as the new breed of product becomes available.

New offerings should integrate seamlessly with what is already there. They provide for multipoint conferences capable of connecting everything from home office desktops up to a dedicated corporate video conferencing facility – with everyone guaranteed a rich, high-definition experience if they have the right system.

The market will be focused on licensing and upgrades, and strong partnerships. Working closely with channel partners will become a key differentiator over the next 18 months.

Eric le Guiniec is EMEA general manager at Vidyo