In that “John the Plumber” post I’ve written last November, I was referring to the bandwidth challenge, but bandwidth is not – surprise, surprise – the only challenge facing mass deployment of video conferencing, for there is also an issue of capacity.

In John’s original post, he estimated approximately 115 endpoints for every 1000 employees. Out of those 115, 100 were desktop clients. IMHO, a real mass deployment should put a desktop client on every desktop, thus increasing the magnitude to approximate 1K endpoints for every 1K employees.

This means that we, as an industry, will have to support thousands of potential customers, most of who are HD users. This is quite a challenge in terms of scalability, for today’s hardware-based conferencing bridges, as the rule of thumb in HW solutions usually is, “more users – more hardware”.

On the other hand, software-based bridges, which can handle a great number of concurrent users, are quite limited when it comes to capabilities, especially when you are talking about high definition H.264 video with SVC tools for every user (which are already available, for instance via our desktop client).

There are a lot of arguments regarding “the best approach” to all this. In some cases – where the deployments are small, simple, homogenic – a software solution may be the best solution. In other cases – where the deployement is heterogenic, large-scale, distributed – hardware seems like the only way to go.

I must admit that I myself have been contemplating this Hardware-Software conflict for a while now. I believe that the solution is, as it usually is, a hybrid of these two “philosophies”. In other words, it’s all about a balance between HW and SW.

“Get The Balance Right” by Depeche Mode

The HW-SW Balance

In one of their many classic 80’s hits, “Get The Balance Right”, Depeche Mode wrote:

“Don’t take this way, don’t take that way
Straight down the middle until next Thursday
Push to the left, back to the right
Twist and turn ’til you’ve got it right…”

Finding a right balance is very true in regards to many things in life, HW and SW conflict included. Such a balance you can find in our Solution Version 7, which was announced at InfoComm 09. The basic philosophy behind it is to give every user, in every scenario, the best possible experience.

What this basically means is that if HW will give you the best solution for your next call, you will use an HW port. If SW will give you the best solution, you will use an SW port. And by “best” I mean optimal in terms of quality of experience as well as cost of experience, as SW ports are much cheaper than HW.

If you are doing a point-to-point call with SCOPIA Desktop inside the organization LAN, there shouldn’t be any need for HW. On the other hand, if you are connecting SCOPIA Desktop with some endpoint and transcoding of some kind is necessary, a HW port may be needed.

In the above illustration, you can easily see how some endpoints connect to the MCUs (the SCOPIA Elite and the SCOPIA Elite 1U) in switching mode (SW) without transcoding, which means that the MCU can support a very large number of users. Others require transcoding (TRX), and so the same MCU can cater to their needs. The conferencing bridges connect to each other using either SW or TRX, depending on the user’s case.

All of this put together means that users can enjoy the best of both worlds. And the number of bridges necessary for your deployment is dependant only on the user  requirements. As this solution allows users to get the right balance for them between HW and SW ports, they can succesfully deploy their video conferencing infrastructure: one that is massively deployed, offers great quality of experience, is cost-effective and is totally managable.

So there you have it – You don’t have to decide. You don’t have to “bet” on this side or the other. You can just twist and turn and enjoy the great balance we now offer.

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A few weeks ago a tweet sent by David Ohayon got me thinking. David wrote (in Hebrew, sorry!):

“Once people thought video calling would be the future. The future proved that people would give up even regular calls for text messages”

This, in fact, was tweeted just when I was reading a very interesting article in physog.com called “A facial expression is worth a thousand words“. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, found out that we are able to recognize facial expressions in motion (for example, in a movie) far better than in a static photograph.

That, of course, correlates to my impression of how video conferencing, which brings the user facial expressions, gestures and body motion, is a richer and much more profound experience than any audio call (or e-mail).

So how can both of these contradicting facts-of-life co-exist? How can it be that while I’m amazed on a daily basis with how much richer visual communications is, even I seem to spend a rather great deal of time writing SMS messages instead of calling, short e-mails instead of meetings and tweeting instead of blogging?

I think that we are looking into two different experiences here, both of which become extremely important in our personal and professional landscapes: on one hand, staying on top of everything, despite the ever-increasing flood of information; on the other hand, collaborating in effective and meaningful ways with friends, peers and colleagues.

KISS and Make Up

2009 was a year that proved that “the message is the message”, to quote the very interesting New York Magazine article about Barack Obama. It was a year where the wonderful data flow of real-time information convinced everyone that this is what the future will look like, but at the same time showed us that we are very close to a dreadful overflow.

The common solution, or so it seems, is keeping it short and simple (KISS). Short blog posts (which I simply can’t seem to write…), short micro-blogging messages, short and simple bottom lines, even short URLs.

And so it does seems like a waste of time to hold a phone conversation, when a short e-mail is sufficient. And if the matter can be solved via an instant message or a SMS, it’s even better. If you find, at the end of the day, that you haven’t spoken to anyone but still managed to get your work done, don’t be surprised. It’s the 21^st century, baby.

A Global Marketplace

On the other end of our lives, collaboration becomes essential. Everyone knows that the Internet has turned the world into one big global village, but to harvest this power you need effective ways to communicate and collaborate.

Google, first with their Docs suite and just recently with their Wave prototype, have proved that people can collaborate without any need for physical proximity. The ability to co-edit a document, share thoughts, share videos and images, communicate through video conference – all of these make the world not just a global village but a global marketplace.

It seems that everyone is working on enabling to collaborate better, as close to a “real” physical collaboration or even better. Giants like Microsoft and Cisco, Video Conferencing vendors, Consumer Electronics vendors, start-ups, you name it. I suspect that this trend will continue in the next decade, up to a point where physical proximity will be regarded as redundant.

Inter-personal communication is a very interesting subject. “Remote” inter-personal communication, which means communicating with one another using various means of communication, without actually being in physical proximity, is even more interesting to me. And the last decade has been extremely exciting in that manner.

Using SCOPIA Desktop on a Mac for video conferencing and chat

And so, although quite contradicting in nature, both of the ideas I started this post with are very true and valid in today’s inter-personal communication world. The more choices we have for communication, the more options we have in making contact. The “trick” is to know which one to use and how.

In professional language this is known as “effective communications”. But this is really a subject for another post.

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Our personal computers are no more just desktop machines that are used for browsing the internet, playing movies and music and chatting.

Real time communication, more virtual appearances and meetings, the need for better quality video-on-demand services – all of these have has increased the global thirst for speed. While many developed nations still strive for a better service, the Asian counterparts – like Japan or South Korea – have already over headed and are ready to face the future of personal computing (and living), where just an internet connection will not do.

The Next Gen of Personal Computing

Here are some of the features of the next generation of personal computing:

1. Video streaming services like YouTube, Hulu and Netfix would offer more featured downloads, in high-end formats like HD and Blu-ray.
2. IPTV, HDTV and UHDV would offer unlimited number of channels using broadband networks.
3. Video conferencing and telepresence services will help us connect to anyone, anywhere in the world, and will allow us to work as if we are in the same location. This is known as real-time collaboration.
4. Simultaneous functionality of bandwidth-hungry applications, such as digital cameras, personal video recorders, smartphones, home video editing equipment, laptop computers, HDTVs, PDAs, home monitoring systems and other smart appliances would require at least 90 Mbps running in every household.
5. Online- and Cloud- based gaming will allows multiple users to compete in high definition graphics gaming from the comfort of their homes despite residing in different locations.
6. Virtual Sports will allow gamers and sports persons to compete with virtual competitors. Japan and South Korea has already added them to their national gaming lists.
7. Tele-consultations, Tele-pathology, Tele-surgery, Remote medical imaging and Grid computing would expand medical research and treatments.
8. Virtual classrooms, multi-campus collaboration, digital content repositories, data visualization and virtual laboratories will be the next generation educational systems.
9. Upload and download of Giga-pixel images, which allow for in-depth zooming of every minute data, needs even more accelerated speeds. Also web applications, like Google Maps or Google Earth, require trillions of bits to capture every square inch of earth in street-view resolution.

Street View on Google Maps Demo.

All these next generation computing and digital media cannot be established with the current availability and speed of broadband offered. As it clearly shows from the figure in the beginning of this post, even leading western countries, such as the UK and the US, fail to provide the bandwidth needed for next generation video-based services.

Technological innovations drive customers to require increasing speeds and greater capacity. Deployment of faster broadband connections will provide more positive benefits for business, education, entertainment and society. The future networks will impact the lives of the citizens on a daily basis and help them to operate virtually but with a real-time experience. And it should materialize as soon as possible, because the future of personal computing is already knocking on our doors.

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You can see many indications to this trend, coming from all over the place, with IM vendors moving strongly into video and video conferencing vendors integrating IM capabilities. But the real deal here is not just integrating both IM and VC on the same system, but supplying the user with a unified experience, where instant messaging can easily be escalated to video calling and a video call can become a video conference easily and intuitively.

If I look at my daily use of these means of communications, IM has become the de-facto standard to start a conversation, or at least verify that the person on the other line is available, as it holds presence information. Now I have a variety of options:

• Continue with the IM chat
• Move the conversation to the telephone – this requires calling (again)
• Escalate the IM chat to video – most IM clients support that today, assuming the other side has video capabilities too.

This makes a lot of sense in the 1-on-1 call scenario, as all options don’t require that much of work to setup – a phone call or a video call. But when it comes to a 1-to-many scenario, things look a bit different – audio conference using the telephone is not trivial and the experience is not that great; upgrading the IM chat to a video conference is usually a BIG headache, as most IM clients do not support currently multi-party conferencing, not to mention that “traditional” VC users can not join the conference.

Initiating a Video Conference from the Chat box

So on one hand, instant messaging has become a primary means of communications (and more so – initiation of communications); on the other hand, the mechanism to launch audio and video conferences from the IM clients is missing.

This is exactly where a new patent, U.S. patent 7,631,039, granted to RADVISION on December and announced publicly yesterday, comes in handy. The RADVISION patent allows users to initiate such conferences in the comfort and ease of their IM clients, using the existing address book and nothing more.

The patent covers the initiation and support of audio and video conferencing using instant messaging.  It allows a user to initiate a video conference from his IM directory or from an on-going IM session.  Such a video conference can be initiated in response to an instant message sent between two or more clients, and participants can then join the conference by any of several possible communication means.  For example, a user may join a conference using a desktop client or a dedicated high definition room system, using standard protocols such as SIP or H.323.

Visual Communications (illustration).

An interesting piece of trivia regarding the patent is that it was drafted a few years ago (2001), and it foreseen quite remarkably the current trends in the real-time communications industry. I believe that in the upcoming months, the fruits of this innovative way of thinking by RADVISION will prove to be both extremely useful and productive for both instant messaging and video conferencing users.

I believe the IM and VC worlds are destined to merge, and when the combined experience – visual communications – becomes a must-have means of communications, the ease-of-use and effectiveness offered by this new idea will be greatly appreciated.

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Innovation in the video conferencing market usually involves, like in every aspect of communication, both sides. Whether the calling scenario is point-to-point or endpoint-to-bridge, rolling out advances in technology and great features is something you must do in both the bridge and the endpoint. To make a long story short, in order to solve the innovation puzzle correctly, you need all pieces.

I must say that in the last few years it’s been kind of a struggle, trying to get our partners and competitors to cooperate with us in bringing such innovations to the market. As part of this understanding, and as part of our desire to bring a full solution to our customers, we announced in 2009 our desktop conferencing system, the SCOPIA VC240, and version 7 of our software client, SCOPIA Desktop.

Completing The Innovation Puzzle

But as I explained last week, if you know the business, a real solution is not complete without a REAL room system. And so, last week we announced we acquired some assets from Aethra, a high-end room systems manufacturer and a long-time partner of RADVISION. This will allow us to complete our offering, and deliver our innovative solutions to a greater audience. If you want, this is the last piece in our innovation puzzle.

Take, for instance, our SVC technology. As I explained here various times, we developed our technology with interoperability in mind. This is why we are able to support both our SVC-based endpoints, in software and hardware, and the rest of the world, without any need for any gateways or any other proprietary components.

But in the near future, with a complete SVC-based portfolio, utilizing an array of endpoints that cater to everyone, from the laptop to the meeting room, we will enable a complete SVC deployment, bringing the greatest benefit to our customers.

Putting Innovation Back Where It Belongs

Remember Tsahi complaining about no real innovation in video conferencing endpoints?  Well, I have to say I agree (I already said it, actually). For the last couple of years it was mainly marketing and sales that were in charge of the innovation – in the terms we use and in the pricing.  It’s about time, I guess, we put the innovation back in the user experience, where it belongs.

It’s about time we had a room system that supports SVC. It’s about time we had an endpoint that can connect through the public internet effectively, delivering the same quality of experience as those connected via managed networks. And that’s just a few examples needing innovation. There are many more.

I hope that in 2010 this will dramatically change, and in return will change the way video conferencing looks and feels, in our conference rooms and outside of them. That’s one puzzle we ought to solve, and the sooner the better.

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[Ever since we started discussing desktop video conferencing as a valid option for providing the entire work force with video conferencing capabilities, including telecommuters and employees that are out of the office, I've been getting a lot of questions regarding this new and ground-breaking concept.

There's lots of confusion around this, and people are pretty much preaching what they're selling: complicated SVC codecs, fancy HD cameras, state-of-the-art next generation CPUs.

Just recently Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel Inc., suggested we recommend the "perfect machine" for a "soft" client implementation - the right processor, graphics card, external webcam, etc.

And so I've asked Vincent Chavy, a guy that needs no introduction here, to use his vast experience, as a long-time veteran in the desktop conferencing industry, and give the expert advice on this one.]

It Is All About The Processor….

Well, sure thing, having a decent processor is very important, but why? And at what point does it stop being important? Is a 16 cores processor (as shown in the image below) going to give you 1080p at 120 fps?

First of all, the process of encoding video costs more than the process of decoding video. A fair estimation is that it takes 4 times more CPU to encode a video than to decode it, at equivalent resolution, of course.

Multi-core processor machines are interesting, because the same cache is shared between multiple cores. The encoding process can therefore be shared between multiple cores in a more optimized fashion. Read, you can encode more! So, in theory, the more cores the better, but there is of course a practical limit.

If you want a machine to encode and decode High Definition 720p at 30 fps, a machine with an Intel i5 or i7 Core2 Duo processor will do fine. If you are more reasonable, and can settle with sending VGA at 30 fps and receiving High Definition 720p at 30fps, a machine with an Intel Core 2 duo 2.4 GHz will just be perfect (note that I said Core2 Duo and not Duo Core).  In these recommendations, I of course take into account the fact that users want to keep some engine power to do those other minor stuff, like browsing the web, checking emails, and instant messaging with others while participating in a meeting.

You may notice that I recommend Intel’s processors here. That’s because our video codecs are highly optimized for the Intel platform, leveraging the low-level Intel libraries which provide the best performance for those processor-intensive operations.

Some stats, including CPU Usage, from our SCOPIA Desktop client in a 720p@30 call.

Come On, It’s all about the camera…

You can now get an extremely good USB camera, with amazing specifications, for a very decent price. The good old days of 160×120 at 5 fps are happily gone (see below for an amazing blast from the past). Today is the era of 720p at 30 fps… and more!

So yes, the camera is very important. And the driver – very important too. And the settings of the camera are even more important.

A blast from the good ( ? ) old CU-SeeMe days.

There are 2 variables that are critical when testing and selecting a camera: capture size (and aspect ratio) and frames per second (fps).

Most of the cameras on the market will capture up to VGA 30 fps. This is the case of almost all the cameras embedded in laptops and desktop screens. There are a few USB cameras that “claim” to capture 30 fps 720p.

So, why is it so hard to do 720p at 30 fps when you can now get a cheap camcorder doing 1080p? Well, the big limiting factor for USB camera vendors is the USB Bus speed, which is limited.

Classic mistakes (user errors, if you prefer) include using a low speed USB hub or plugging in your camera in an old USB 1.0 plug. If you want to get the best of the best of your high performance camera, make sure it is plugged on a high speed 2.0 USB plug, directly on your computer. Oh, and of course, all USB devices usually share the same BUS. So if you wondered why your camera is slow when you are doing your weekly backup on your USB drive… Well, you now know why.

Let’s do the math: an image of 720p (that is 1280 by 720 pixels), is composed of 921,600 pixels. A pixel is usually coded using 24 bits, so capturing 720p at 30 frames per second means 921,600 * 30 * 24 = 663.5 Mbps. And guess what is the maximum speed of a USB 2.0 BUS? 480 Mbps.

To overcome this limitation most camera vendors are now compressing the image before transmitting it from the camera to the PC. So the video stream acquired from the camera is now a compressed stream instead of a raw stream as it was before, and compression introduces some loss in quality.

Fancy things on the camera also affect the frame rate. This includes digital zoom, automatic light correction, as well as all the funky moustaches and hats you can digitally add to your image. Capturing and sending 720p at 30 frames per second is a serious business. One parameter off, and the punishment (either on image size or frames per second) will be immediate.  So we recommend turning off all settings like face tracking, automatic adjustments in low light environments as well as any automatic configuration (auto focus, auto white balance) that makes the video pulsate.  In short, any configuration with the word “automatic” in it is suspicious.

One last warning – as mentioned above, the camera driver is equally important. So make sure you always have the latest and greatest from your camera vendor.

To be complete, I should mention that there is an alternative to USB Cameras. You can buy a video acquisition card, and use your camcorder or any other compatible PTZ camera. Although this is something that has some value, I believe that for the cost it implies, you will be better served by a solution like the SCOPIA VC240.

Hey, Don’t Forget The Graphic Card…

The graphic card and the graphic card driver are key to the video rendering (display of the video) process. A weak graphic card or an outdated graphic card driver will result in high CPU usage when rendering video – and well, this is some precious CPU cycles that will not be available for the video codec.

Since it is now rare to find a bad graphics card, the one you have in your computer should be fine. It is however a good idea to verify that your drivers are up-to-date.

What is going to be very interesting is to see the role of graphic cards in the future of personal computing, especially their GPUs (Graphic Processing Unit). With technologies, libraries and framework like Open CL, Microsoft Media Framework, ATI Stream or NVIDIA CUDA, a lot of the video processing or pre-processing will be possibly handled by the graphic card. Meaning that the GPU will be helping the CPU a lot more than today.

OK, Then – What IS The Perfect Desktop Video-Conferencing Machine?

Well, if you are ready to settle with sending VGA at 30fps and receiving 720p at 30 fps, a good laptop (Core2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or better) will do just fine. The camera embedded in your laptop is most likely good enough as well.  A lot of my colleagues are using their DELL XPS Laptop, with the embedded camera and have a great videoconferencing experience.

If you want more, then you need to aim for an i5 or i7 processor machine with windows 7 and with the best of breed camera (Logitech 9000 or Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD).

To end with a personal note, I am attending almost all my meetings from my MacBook Pro, and I would not trade it for any other machine. I am more than happy with sending VGA, and I have to say, that – sometimes – I would even prefer sending less… like CIF, god forgive!

I was never told “you need to shave” until high definition arrived. I was never told “gosh you look tired” in the CIF days. Remember, with desktop video conferencing, you are right in front of your camera, so your audience WILL see that you were partying last night. But that’s an issue for a different kind of post…

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At around the same time as that post, I written about what telepresence is and what it is not. In a nutshell, ever since Cisco announced their Telepresence system (end of 2006), Telepresence has been distanced from “plain old” video conferencing as much as possible. The PR basically argued that video conferencing failed, and telepresence is the next big thing.

And the PR worked. By the end of 2007 most video conferencing vendors re-branded their high-end systems as “telepresence”, totally blurring the definition of telepresence. Then came “affordable telepresence” , “personal telepresence” (previously known as “executive systems”), “home telepresence”, whatever.

Personal telepresence with granddad?!

Telepresence – Out , Personal Telepresence – In

Wainhouse Research recently released a research note titled “The Telepresence Vanishing Act“, arguing that the telepresence as a market segment is disappearing, as it is not a real product or a product category, but a different “experience”. As the “standard” video conferencing systems, the room systems, are evolving rapidly towards 1080p video and big displays, as well as paying much more attention to lighting, acoustics and camera issues, the room system experience is converging with telepresence.

And if telepresence is no longer a big hype, and if the price ain’t right, there’s no surprise that at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 most vendors have rolled out low-cost telepresence-like systems. Cisco and LifeSize were probably the pioneers, back in 2008, with the LifeSize Room 200 and the Cisco Telepresence 500, delivering an impressive feature set with a reasonable price tag (The Room 200 was priced at $16,999). It was/is not telepresence, but a rather nice-looking HD video conferencing system. But go argue with marketers.

And with that “market it now, worry about the results later” spirit, and with price becoming an issue and telepresence losing its clear definition in the market, came the latest hype: “software telepresence”. Yes, there’s no mistake here – I’m talking about a software client, running on some kind of personal computer, marketed as “telepresence”.

You know by now I’m a big fan of desktop conferencing and collaboration infrastructure. After all, we are very proud of our software client. But sorry – desktop conferencing is NOT telepresence. And while it’s great to take a hit at Cisco, and comparing the low price tag of such systems to that of Telepresence, it is like comparing cherries to watermelons…

The Real Deal: Compatibility and Interoperability

Take, for instance, the latest release from Vidyo, the software video conferencing start-up. They recently announced the VidyoRoom HD-220, with a price tag of $6,995, claiming it can replace the $250,000 system that Cisco sells.

Dave Greenfield from ZDNet’s Team Think points out to the real deal here – it’s not the 1080p or the 60fps that counts; it’s compatibility:

“What’s still needed is a way to coordinate all of the different high-end video system. It’s not just a matter of supporting the H.323 video either…

Then there’s having to coordinate all of the other components that are possible in a video conference – screen display, acoustical mapping, screen display and the like. Vendors have different ways of implementing and then managing these exchanges.”

And, of course, there’s interoperability.

“All very nice, but the big issue here is compatibility. A video system that connects with one or two other offices is far less useful than one that interoperates with every webcam on every desk…”

And if I may be blunt here, there’s also the issue of the overall design and the logic behind the whole thing. These “software-based” solutions look just like they sound: a weird-looking server, with external components that don’t really fit the over-all design.

So while the server in the picture above looks ok, and has an appealing price tag, you may notice it misses some basic components. You know – the microphone, the camera, the data sharing cable. Yep, you’re expected to shop for the separate external components on your own. It’s just what Tsahi warned us about in a recent post – peripherals are a big headache.

Why Cheap Costs More

Just imagine going to a car dealership, and being offered a car with a great price tag, only it misses a few simple external components – wheels, gear, engine. But you know – any wheel will work here, and we support a variety of gears, and everyone sells engines these days. Would you buy such a car at that dealership?

Impressive as the price tag is, when you add the few necessities, such as an HD camera, a high quality microphone system, high quality speakers and a VGA connector (at least), such a video solution can cost more than $30,000. Or at least that’s what Dave Greenfield says.

And the bottom line: it doesn’t just feel like a mess, it also looks like one. Just compare the “complete” server-based solution with the slick Lifesize Express 220, that has everything built-in for less than $7000, and you’ll get my drift:

There’s an old Jewish saying claiming that “cheap costs more most of the time”. And while I strongly believe in affordable solutions, when it comes to a room system you better choose a room system grade solution, and not something that comes near and is marketed as such.

A software client is a software client, a room system is a room system, a telepresence system is a telepresence system – they each have their own characteristics, their own benefits, their own drawbacks. So don’t let the marketing people confuse you. Understand what you need, and choose appropriately.

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“There are many methods for predicting the future. For example, you can read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards or crystal balls. Collectively these methods are known as “nutty”. Or you can put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer models, more commonly referred to as “a complete waste of time”

As 2010 begins, it’s predictions time again, when everyone who’s writing anywhere must give their predictions for the up-coming year. I will not disclose here my methods for predicting the future,  but will share with you what I commonly refer to as “my educated guess”:

1. Video Calling and Video Conferencing Will Merge Into Visual Communications

Video calling is getting more wide-spread and more buzz, especially now that Skype is making a lot of noise in CES. On the other hand, in the enterprise front, the video conferencing market is still quite secluded from the IM/Video chat hype. In 2010 I suspect that these two islands will finally meet and merge, and the result would be a better, more complete experience – the one we like to call visual communications.

2. Video Calling Will Be In Everybody’s Homes (And Not Just Their Desktops)

To continue from the last prediction, video calling on the desktop is becoming something everyone is using, thanks to Skype, Google and their likes. But 2010 seems to be the turning-point where video will leave the desktop and move into the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the restroom, you name it. Calling someone using video would be just like calling him on the phone, only better.

3. IT Will Have Their Hands Full With Bandwidth Issues

As video calling will become popular and as visual communications becomes a reality, IT managers will have to deal with bandwidth issues in their enterprise networks. Bandwidth management – in the endpoint level, in the bridge level and in the management level – will become a must, if visual communications is to be successfully deployed in the entire organization.

4. Everyone Would Have Their iPhone App

Video conferencing?  Video calling?  Video anything? – there’s an app for that. 2010 will be the year where every player in the market will come out with their own iPhone app. What will these apps do?  We’ll have to wait and see. But in 2010 the business reality will be: you have an iPhone app, therefore you are.

5. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) Will Not Become The De-Facto Standard

SVC is great. SVC tools do wonders to video conferencing. But 2010 will not be the year that the market will switch to SVC-based solutions. SVC-based endpoints and SVC silos will be deployed, but the majority of enterprises will use either non-SVC solutions or a hybrid of SVC and non-SVC.

Bonus: A Bunch Of Stuff That Won’t Happen This Year

B2B Video Conferencing will not be solved. 1080p will not become the de-facto resolution. Cloud-based video conferencing will not become popular. Social media will not penetrate to the enterprise. Mobile video conferencing will not happen. The iPhone will not have a front-faced camera (yet…). Software-only MCUs will not become popular. People will still not reach an understanding about what telepresence is.

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But the "next generation" of video coding is a very interesting topic, not to mention very relevant for this blog. So I asked Christian Timmerer, who I have been following on-line via his excellent blog and twitter, to try and explain where we're going and what's next in the video coding world.]

The xVC Era

VC stands for many things these days – Venture Capital and Video Conferencing to name a few. But VC in the multimedia community means Video Coding, the science behind the many uses of video in our everyday lives.

In a keynote speech at ICUIMC’08 Fernando Pereira asked “is there a xVC virus?”. He referred to the “era of xVC” that conquered the mainstream multimedia community, where “x” stands for A, S, M and many other letters, as I will briefly discuss here.

First there was AVC, the Advanced Video Coding standard, also known as ITU-T H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 10. Its first version was published in 2003, providing 50% more compression efficiency compared to previous video coding standards (or in other words: providing the same quality using less than half the bits).

In 2007 came SVC, the Scalable Video Coding extension to AVC, enabling one to code multiple versions of the same video (in terms of resolution, frame rate and bit rate) using one bitstream, while keeping the overhead at a reasonable level.

Next we have MVC, a Multi-view Video Coding extension, which enables efficient coding of 3D video using multiple viewpoints and directions to create a depth impression of a scene and an interactive selection of views within a certain range.

There is actually more xVC standards, such as Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) and Distributed Video Coding (DVC), but these are quite hardcore… I would like to focus on the efforts towards a “mainstream” next generation coding standard, one that would enable higher resolutions, higher frame rates and higher quality, without losing coding efficiency (and possibly keeping the 50% improvement compared to previous standards). These efforts are currently called HVC – High-performance Video Coding.

An introduction to HVC

The main purpose of HVC is to come up with a new generation of video compression technology, that enables substantially higher compression capability than the existing AVC standard. The activity started with a vision to address the next generation of ultra-HD (UHD) devices (displays and cameras) already appearing on the horizon, while providing better support for mobile terminals, where the video quality at low resolutions, frame rates, and bit rates today is largely unacceptable.

Ultra HD vs. High Definition resolution comparison

Therefore, ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T SG16 Q6/16, the leading standardization bodies in this domain (and yes – they’ve renewed their collaboration), are currently pursuing a Call for Proposals, which will be finalized in January 2010, with responses evaluated in April 2010. The requirements for HVC range are for better compression performance over:

• Higher picture formats (potentially from QVGA to 8Kx4K, or UHD)
• Higher frame rates (24 to 60 fps)
• Variable color spaces (YCbCr/RGB) and color sampling (4:4:4 up to 14 bits per component)

while maintaining low delay, error resiliency, scalability and more.

The competitive phase of the standardization process (i.e., from the starting point until a Committee Draft is reached) has a more or less detailed timeline defining how/when to register/submit responses to the call and how they are going to be evaluated.

For evaluation purposes, a couple of video sequences have been defined, covering a range of specifications (and uses), ranging from 2560×1600 sequences of street cameras (Class A) to various 416×240p clips (Class D) to 720p@60fps streams (Class E).

It is probably worth noting that submissions to Class A will be evaluated based on PSNR and rate only, whereas submissions for other classes will be evaluated by means of a formal subjective assessment as well. The reason for doing so is that subjective tests are quite expensive. The tests will be conducted in different institutes, such as FUB, EBU and EPFL.

A New Standard Is Coming… Stay Tuned!

The HVC efforts have already begun. Based on the current timeline, one can expect the new standard to be available around the end of 2012/beginning of 2013. This may seem far away, but as many video infrastructure products have a 2 year design process, this is very relevant to today’s design efforts.

And so we are looking forward to a new and very exciting xVC episode, and it will be very interesting to see how the new standard evolves and whether it will fit today’s expectations. Thus, stay tuned!

[Chrisitan Timmerer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Technology (ITEC) - Multimedia Communication Group. His research topics include multimedia content transport, multimedia adaptation in constrained and streaming environments and Quality of Experience. He has published more than 50 papers in these areas, and is an editorial board member of the Encyclopedia of Multimedia, the ACM/Springer International Journal on Multiemedia Tools and Applications, and associate editor for IEEE Computer Science Computing Now.]

Want to keep up with HVC?  Here are a few useful web sites and blogs:

• Leonardo Chiariglione’s website (http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/) and blog (http://blog.chiariglione.org/)
• http://www.h265.net/
• Iain Richardson’s blog: http://www.vcodex.com/vcodexblog.html
• Daniele Alfonso’s blog: http://mmediatech.blogspot.com/
• And my personal blog: http://multimediacommunication.blogspot.com/

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Other than some very interesting presentations given by my colleagues and myself about unified communications, desktop collaboration, video conferencing and video technologies, there were a few guest speakers who I found very interesting as well as thought provoking.

[If you are interested in my presentation at the conference, The Secrets of Scalable Video Coding (SVC), it is available online]

Real Problems, Real Benefits

The Conference kicked-off with two success stories of video conference implementations: Mr. Guilaume Boudin, VP Advanced Services at Orange (France), discussed Open Videopresence, an end-to-end, fully managed video meeting service “as simple as a phone call”; Mr. Roni Shlovsky, Head of Communication Infrastructure, in Bank Leumi, the biggest bank in Israel, discussed Leumi Digital, a project I already wrote about here. Both, of course, powered by RADVISION.

But the most interesting discussion on my part was a panel (see above) hosted by Moshe Machline, our VP Corporate Marketing, featuring IT managers from different organizations that implemented video conferencing infrastructure in the last few years. Panel members discussed freely the ins and outs of video conferencing deployment, including things they struggled with, things they are proud of and the big value it brings to their organizations.

The interesting thing about the panel was that, during the conference breaks, while mingling with the crowd, explaining about our technology and hearing the conversation around the demo floor, I basically heard the same things that were discussed in the panel.

To sum things up, I think that as the business arena gets more and more complex, with and without regard to the economical crisis, organizations and employees struggle with a few basic problems:

• How can you achieve “more” with “less”?
• How can you move faster?
• How can you handle the growing amounts of information?
• How can you balance work load and personal life?
• How can you work better with your customers?
• How can you work better with your partners and suppliers?
• How can you integrate new technologies and tools into the work place?

Of course, all of these have business and financial implications on the organizations and the economy in general:

• Budgets are being cut – we need to stretch them to the max
• Markets are moving fast – we need to keep with them
• There’s too much information – we can miss out on opportunities
• Employees worry about their personal life – we need to allow them to work more flexibly
• Customer satisfaction is extremely important – we need to care for our customers
• Partners and suppliers are important – we need to keep close relationships with them
• New technologies can offer great benefits – we need to utilize them as much as possible

The Collaboration Quadrant

There’s a quote I like, ever since I saw it in some Cisco brochure, taken from The McKinsey Quarterly Review, 2005 #4, titled “The Next Revolution in Interactions“:

“Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next great performance challenge-and the stakes are high.”

In my view, this sums up beautifully all of the questions above and their implications. However, it seems that not too much has changed since 2005. In fact, while Tsahi Levent-Levi gave his keynote presentation on the communication continuum, which I briefly discussed here, I tried to think about the communication means that are common in the workplace vs. what is available, according to a similar paradigm:

As you can see, I’ve put on the horizontal axis the level of experience that these means offer – text-only on the left side, multimedia (voice, video) on the right. On the vertical axis I’ve put the reach of these means – from near (individuals, mostly fellow employees) to far (large target audience, both inside and outside the organization).

It is quite clear that we moved from a text-only, one-to-one, near communication – “call”, to a multi-media, many-to-many, far communication – “collaboration”, across what I can now call the Collaboration Quadrant.

The differences between “call” and “collaboration” are quite clear:

• A call has a single source and is usually synchronous. Collaboration can have multiple sources, and be both real-time and non real-time.
• A call usually connects parties from within the organization. Collaboration connects people from dispersed locations, but also organizations.
• A call is done within a static, pre-defined network. Collaboration is dynamic.
• A call allows you the option to find the information you need (via the people you need). Collaboration makes certain that the people and resources will be available.

Moving to a “Collaboration” Way of Thinking

Moving from a “call” way of thinking to a “collaboration” way of thinking is key for the success of the modern organization. To do so, one must go past the traditional means of communication, such as e-mail, telephone and IM, and open up to the means that occupy the top 2 quadrants: multimedia-based, social means, such as video conferencing, blogs, unified communication, etc.

These “new” technologies are “unpopular”. The reason for it is that as they are new, both to users and IT managers, it is unclear to both what their contribution is (ROI) and what it takes to deploy them properly in the organization. While IM and e-mail have become popular both inside and outside the organization, video-based and social-based services have yet to win both, and so are left out.

Seeing is Believing – a global conference during the Summit.

An example for that is a question asked during the panel from the audience: “why use video for calls that connect, for instance, two meeting rooms in different geographical locations”. For people from the industry, this is a trivial question: video makes these kinds of meetings work. For people in the audience, not using video, this is indeed a valid question – they don’t see the benefit, and so they don’t see why they should make the effort.

But what I liked was the answers given by the panel members themselves – users, IT managers, people who have deployed video conferencing within their organizations and can testify to the benefits it brings. Some of the answers given were:

• “Seeing is believing. You build trust much quicker and much easier using video”.
• “With video you know who’s talking” (as meeting rooms hold more than one participant)
• “Video makes the meeting effective. People stay focused”
• “Video makes everyone feel connected”

And there you have it – with a few real answers to a serious question, you can easily see how a “new” technology can make an existing work process much more productive, if you just jump into the water and try.

To take from McKinsey, the next revolution in communications is collaboration. The stakes are high, and you better be ready.

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