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.”

It’s not often I see public telephone boxes anymore – they are out there but who uses them? A recent article in the New York Times got me thinking about this archaic piece of equipment. Here in the US, we live in a society where 277 million people subscribe to a mobile phone service.

The ubiquitous home phone is also seeing a decline too. “The decline in the cordless phone market is indicative of a larger story,” says ABI Research practice director Jason Blackwell, “which is that of wireless substitution worldwide. In developed nations a growing number of people are dropping their fixed phone lines altogether in favor of mobile-only services.”

There are a multitude of reasons for this decline: mobile phone usage, cultural, cheaper long-distance calling services, the economy and perhaps relevance. Much like cable television losing out to the Internet, the landline telephone is losing relevance with the introduction of its younger sibling – the sleeker, smarter mobile phone.

However, the television may be set to regain its position in the household and push out its little cousin the telephone.

Only recently at CES did both LG Electronics and Panasonic announce Internet-enabled TV’s and a partnership with Skype. The Television is growing into new and expanded places and could function as both the PC and telephone. The possibilities for content, cable and Telco providers to monetize additional communication services in this way are vast.

Next week – GIPS will be presenting a webinar on the subject, so if you would like to sign up click here.

If two recent reports are any indication, video is quickly becoming crucial to enterprise communications. According to a report by Dell’Oro Group, annual revenues for the Unified Communications market will outpace the enterprise voice market through 2014. While there are many important features included in a UC solution (including voice), video is a prominent component that helps differentiate a UC product from one that only includes voice.

In addition, GIPS released a survey last week of 1,200 business professionals in the US and Asia regarding their use of video conferencing, and discovered some surprising results. Among the findings:

-          In three of the four countries surveyed, a majority of respondents had participated in a video conference or video chat.

-          79% of those who use video conferencing technology rely on consumer applications.

-          The most common reason that participants gave for using video conferencing was to communicate and understand others more clearly and effectively.

-          Video delay and freezing continue to be technical concerns for many users.

If you are interested in reading the entire report, you can find it here.

As long as I have been involved with VoIP the debate whether QoS methods are the solution to providing good voice quality has been ongoing. With QoS methods I refer to protocols that allows for prioritization of packets that have low latency requirements such as VoIP packets. Of course, if from the VoIP applications point of view, the network is perfect you should also expect perfect quality. As a a side point, that is a very reasonable expectation but unfortunately something that is very often not the case. The reasons can be endpoint hardware or software related or a combination of both. I discuss some of the potential issues in a previous blog post.

The reason why QoS methods are not heralded as the savior of VoIP quality (and video for that matter) is that they are often impractical to implement and not as efficient as one might assume. For example, if the amount of data on the network that needs to be prioritized represents a significant portion of the total traffic the scheme will fail completely. Another issue is the impact on the so called background traffic that doesn’t get prioritized and may result in unacceptable behavior of the less prioritized data streams.

QoS methods are successfully used in well managed and controlled networks but because the VoIP traffic often traverses many networks, including the largely unmanaged Internet, rarely can end-to-end prioritization be guaranteed.

because of these limitations of QoS methods it is crucial that any voice or video offering over packet networks deploy endpoints that can compensate for network issues.

So, you may ask, what can I do on my own network? In this article in  ComputerWorld you can learn how to tweak your WiFi router settings to implement QoS on your home network. As I mentioned previously, this will unfortunately only help the performance of the WiFi network and it requires changing the router configuration in a manner most consumers are not aware of or not able to do because of the complexity involved. So, even though I think it is a good idea to make such adjustments they only solve problems on a small portion of the data path for a call (the actual broadband connection is much more often the real culprit) and are unlikely to be done made by most end users. Therefore, as a developer of a VoIP or video over IP product you can never assume that QoS will save you, you have to make sure that your product has been properly designed to mitigate network issues.

The video hype is ever increasing where Cisco buying Tandberg and Logitech buying Lifesize are just two examples. I think the video hype is good news and has written about it a lot.

But, as one of our biggest and most famous customers almost reminds me when I meet them, don’t forget about voice quality. Voice quality is much more important than video quality they say. I totally agree with this!

During a video conference business meeting, the important thing is to have very high quality (HD) voice with robustness. The speech shouldn’t be garbled so that the attendants can’t follow the conversation. Also, a consistent high quality is needed to combat attendant fatigue and increase the effectiveness of the meeting.

Video quality is also very important for the multimedia experience of the attendants. However, if the video sometimes gets a little jerky or freezes, the meeting will still continue as long as you hear what is being said clearly.

I can’t resist pointing out that GIPS is uniquely well positioned to enable our customers to provide the desired end user experience since we started out on the voice side and continuously strive to provide maximum voice quality!

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.

I spent last week up in the Norwegian mountains moose hunting (and yes the hunting was very successful). This is way out in the wilderness, but a couple of years ago a cell tower came to a hilltop. No high speed data though because of limited link capacity out of there.

I brought my new HTC Hero Android phone to test it at this unusual usage scenario. Overall it worked very well. The most impressive thing is that it instantly jumps on a WiFi connection it has seen before. My friend that lives there has WiFi in his house and whenever I was at his house I synched up on email. Data roaming through the cell tower I had turned off. Another nice feature is that it warns for roaming charges.

One complaint I had was that the Microsoft Exchange Synch program was very slow. Don’t know why. The built in Gmail worked much better.

The big thing that happened in our business while I was away (at least for a Norwegian) was Cisco’s bid for Tandberg. In my mind, it further validates video conferencing and our vision at GIPS that anywhere, anytime, high-quality video conferencing is the future.

There are hundreds of millions of Internet and mobile telephone users across the globe that have experienced GIPS voice and video technology roughly the same amount who don’t know they had the experience. It has been a seamless and enjoyable experience  (unless the conversation turned sour…sorry we can’t do anything about that) allowing people to connect more clearly and on a far richer level than the tired old telephone that currently sits in the corner of your office or home – rarely used.

A brief history…The telephone that Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented in 1876 and made the first call was ground breaking – it was born out of Bell’s passion and teaching to help deaf people to be fully integrated into society. Nearly four decades later the first transcontinental call was made from New York to San Francisco. There were other improvements but pretty much nothing had changed until recently.

GIPS and HD voice popped along but it still remains pretty much an undiscovered technology to the majority of people around the world. On the one hand that’s a depressing story on the other hand it’s great – a huge opportunity lies ahead. From everyday phone calls, conference calls to emergency services – vast improvements are available and the tide will turn – especially as we migrate from the old copper wire to IP networks that run underground.

But HD voice is not the end of the story, it’s only the beginning. Video chat and video conferencing is becoming more prevalent. As people become more familiar with Skype, Gmail and Yahoo video chat – the more at ease people are with video as a communication channel.

So while we have GIPS engineers across the world, coding, de-bugging and tinkering with the perfection of HD video and voice communication – their biggest goal is not writing cool pieces of code it’s the user experience.

So it was nice to see some outside validation of GIPS’ efforts recently. In a company interview with San Jose Mercury reporter Mike Swift, he wrote:  “In short, the [GIPS video] technology is good enough that you start to forget about the technology, and concentrate on the conversation.”

It was very nice to read and I couldn’t have said it better myself. As our engineers recognize we aim to please our customer and their users. The experience is what matters – that’s why our engineers spend their waking lives trying to figure out how to make the experience both simple and better for users. It also allows our customers to focus on their business by relying on the latest video and voice technology keeping them one step ahead of the game: “Yahoo says its video chat traffic is up since it launched its latest version of Messenger with the GIPS technology … people in video conversations … now spend double the time per call as people on audio-only calls.”

So from Mr. Bell’s telephone call back in 1915 when Dr. Bell and Mr. Watson, (his former associate) talked and “heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago,” we now have video and you can see more clearly and communicate far better than before.

That’s not the only thing that’s changed. Back in 1915 the charge for a telephone conversation between New York and San Francisco was $20.70 for the first three minutes, and $6.75 for each minute thereafter. That same five-minute call today from San Francisco to New York cost would cost the equivalent of $756 in today’s money. Today we can video chat, have HD calls for much, much less.

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!

Yesterday, HP launched a new video conferencing tool called SkyRoom that will be available for $149 per client and free on select HP business desktop and mobile workstations. From their marketing videos, it definitely looks like a nice collaboration tool, so I am looking forward to installing it and giving it a try. 

Despite the excitement, I did raise my eyebrows a bit when I read that Jeff Wood, director of worldwide marketing for workstations at HP, stated that “SkyRoom is basically a codec” and that “the secret sauce is a HD codec developed over the years that can take info from host system. It’s very good. It’s been used by NASA on the Mars Rover program.”      

The setup documents and specifications state that H.264 and MPEG2 are used for video and MPEG for audio. Wow, so that is where they found the codecs. I didn’t realize that a widely deployed industry standard could be considered a “secret”, but I guess this proves that the codec can deliver high quality video to a variety of applications. 

Unfortunately, to use SkyRoom, each participant needs to be on the same VPN because the application does not traverse firewalls. In addition, echo cancellation does not work on laptops, making desktop conferencing less desirable. Nevertheless, I cheer HP’s innovation and look forward to the proliferation of high quality video throughout the collaboration market.