In recent months LG Electronics, Panasonic and Samsung have announced television sets that allow people to view online content such as videos and photos through an easy-to-use web interface that’s built into the TV. What this also can enable is two way video communications – though the cameras need to be separately purchased from the television.

Earlier this week GIPS held a webinar on the topic ‘Is the Television the next Two-Way Communication Tool?’ If you didn’t have a chance to listen to the webinar, you can always listen to the recorded version. We took polls from the live audience, as what better way to affirm our own research conclusions on the TV as a future two-way communication tool.

We directed 4 polls to the audience and 400 people provided the following results:

As TV audiences have fragmented and evolved their tastes, the television has become less central to the home/family experience.  The evolution of the TV as an interactive device has the ability to take back ground lost as a focal point in the home – recapturing the living room perhaps. 98 percent of poll respondents view the TV as becoming an interactive consumer electronic device and perhaps competing with the PC.

The live webinar audience was a solid mix of broadcast industry professionals, so it was interesting to see their response to this question: Who will benefit most from two-way communication via the TV? There are opportunities for all slices within the broadcast industry but ultimately who will benefit is the user. While we didn’t include the end user in this poll, our assumption was that the TV watcher will ultimately benefit in the long run.

While this next poll would be better directed towards consumers – it was interesting nonetheless to gauge the industry professionals’ opinion.

Finally, we asked the broadcast audience when they see the rollout of interactive programming and TVs. Well it’s already happening and as we discussed in the webinar. Oprah, CNN and Sports reporting are just a few of the places this is already happening.  The times are a changing for the broadcast industry and as Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

GIPS is a platinum sponsor at the upcoming eComm conference in Amsterdam this month. Want to know why? Well you can hear or read directly from GIPS vice president of engineering Jan Linden and Chief Marketing Officer, Joyce Kim and learn more about H.264 SVC.

On another note, it was nice to see that the Seattle Times ran with the Yahoo video chat story syndicated from the San Jose Mercury.

Once again GIPS is sponsoring eComm but this time it’s in Amsterdam. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend the conference in California earlier this year, here’s a little more information about the show.

It’s not a tradeshow, it’s not a sales pitch stage and it’s definitely not boring. If you’re a thinker, an innovator or entrepreneur it’s a great place to meet people wearing the same hat – it’s bubbling with ideas, products and futurists  and gathering all these people in one room is no small feat.

While shows like DEMO are great – it’s like trying to get into a nightclub, when you’re underage, don’t have the right attire or if your names not down you’re just not coming in….unless you want to pay nearly $20K. eComm is different; it’s that afterschool gathering of the Mensa Science club with brilliant minds from across the globe in one large conference room discussing emerging communications.

This year, Jan Linden GIPS vice president of engineering will talk about video conferencing with a focus on H.264 SVC. (Above is Jan’s presentation earlier this year on the iPhone.) So if you want to learn more you should seriously think about attending. Our CTO, Roar Hagen will also be at the show too.

It’ll be the best conference you attend this year.

Last week, GIPS sponsored a webinar on H.264 SVC and its potential impact on the video conferencing market. During the webinar, we asked the roughly 350 participants how often they participate in video conferences or video chats.  I found the results quite intriguing.

Nearly 70 people responded to the question, with 38 percent claiming they use video conferencing/chat at least once a week. 41 percent said they never or hardly ever use video.  I think this reveals a real dichotomy in exposure to and usage of real-time video. People who have been exposed to video conferencing or chat applications, like Yahoo! Messenger, tend to use them quite frequently. However, there is still a substantial portion of the population who has yet to fully experience what video conferencing has to offer.

In one sense this means that there is still a need to educate the market on the benefits of video conferencing, and to demonstrate that quality has improved significantly over early implementations. Yet it also means that there is enormous potential for growth, since it seems that all is needed for video communication to take off is for people to come in contact with it.

Granted, this was just a snapshot of a group of people in a very unique industry, so it may not be completely indicative of wider usage of the technology. With this in mind,  GIPS is currently conducting a survey of more than 1,000 business professionals in the U.S., Japan, S. Korea and Hong Kong to determine in which regions video conferencing/chat is being widely adopted, for business and personal use. The results of the survey will be released later this month. Stay tuned!

A couple weeks ago, a reporter asked me why video conferencing has never really taken off. I actually had to pause and think about this one, instead of just spouting whatever nonsense came into my head first. So many times I find myself cheerleading the industry in which I work, without really thinking about its limitations. I came up with a few reasons, some having to do with market demand for such solutions, and some technical.

On the market side, I think we are seeing some of the old barriers to adoption that expensive hardware presented being broken down with the introduction of lower cost, flexible desktop conferencing solutions. However, it is on the technical side that I believe there is the most promise. H.264 SVC is quickly becoming the industry standard for video coding. SVC helps overcome two big problems that have plagued video conferencing. One, it maintains video resolution in multi-party conferences. It used to be that if you were in a conference with a bunch of HD-capable endpoints, and someone joined the conference using a desktop machine or other device using standard definition VGA or worse, it dumbed everyone down to the lowest resolution in the conference. SVC is different. It allows participants to send and receive HD quality video to and from any endpoint that is capable of displaying HD. That means those on HD-capable endpoints can see each other in HD, even if is someone else joins the conference on a mobile phone.

Second, by dividing a video stream into a base layer with additional “enhancement” layers, SVC can maintain quality in the face of packet loss.  Users can be guaranteed a consistent experience when the base layer is protected during periods of heavy packet loss. Even if enhancement layers are lost, basic information still arrives at its destination. This means that, instead of the blockiness and comet tail effects that accompany packet loss in traditional solutions, SVC delivers a basic level of visual quality, with only minor reductions in frame rate and resolution.

To further illustrate these points, GIPS is offering a number of educational goodies on the topic.

On Tuesday, the 22^nd (tomorrow) we will be hosting a webinar on H.264 SVC. You can sign up here.

We will also host a couple of demonstrations on our website that clarify the above points. The new content should be available here tomorrow.

Finally, for those looking for more technical details, we will publish a white paper. Again, the content will be available here tomorrow.

When someone thinks of the most demanding and discerning audiences in the world – the Japanese market is always high on the list – high-quality is always top of the list of priorities for this audience. So, it was fitting news today that GIPS video conference technology was deployed with the number one web conferencing provider in Japan – ANET.

Their solution, Fresh Voice, is using H.264 SVC from GIPS and it was important for ANET to have interoperability so they wanted to make it easy for their customers to connect with other video conferencing systems such as Polycom, Tandberg, and Sony.

It was also important for ANET to offer their customers state-of-the-art HD voice and HD video quality and also to reduce both the audio and video delay.  It was equally important to reduce the cost of ownership for their customers by having a software solution that was flexible and could support multiple platforms – which is why they chose GIPS Video ConferenceEngine.