Companies Need Network Upgrade For Full Video Utility

<B> Companies Need Network Upgrade For Full Video Utility</B>

By Chris Davis

While major increases in the capabilities of videoconferencing technology--particularly in the areas of streaming video and storing and editing conferences--will develop in the very near future, corporations will have to upgrade their technology networks before videoconferencing has a huge impact on meetings and group travel.

Smaller capability increases, such as speaker-locating technology, have recently arrived or soon will.

Other developments once thought of as the next big thing--desktop videoconferencing, in particular--haven't made a huge splash because of most companies' networks aren't yet advanced enough to fully handle them.

"What people imagine is sitting in front of a desktop workstation, at a networked PC, calling someone in a branch office over that PC," said Glenn Adamo, vice president of the Sony Electronics videoconferencing division in San Jose, Calif. "While it's technically possible, it's technically impractical at the moment, because of the amount of signal that's necessary to do audio and video over a local area or wide area network. You need a lot of bytes to make that happen."

Adamo said many companies could have the necessary network expansion in 18 to 36 months. "Right now, they're not prepared for the breadth of the expansion of the signal that would be necessary. But it's absolutely going to happen."

If and when corporations upgrade those networks, they'll have the opportunity to take advantage of the next major development in videoconferencing: the application of streaming video technology. This lets bursts of information flow through the network, where otherwise the entire video clip would need to download before appearing.

"Streaming video also can extend the reach of videoconferencing, because videoconferencing is ostensibly a real-time application," said Kevin Flanagan, marketing manager at PictureTel Corp. in Andover, Mass. "But you can delay it. The content can be stored on a server and streamed out to people when they need it. They can timeshift it, annotate it, edit it, take a clip and show it to others. Or you can have people in near-real time send an e-mail into the conference."

The ability to customize the timing and content of a videoconference to meet the needs of those who aren't in the room are some of the largest benefits of streaming-video videoconferencing. Flanagan compared having the technology to having your own broadcast television station, since anyone connected to the Internet could be reached with streaming video.

"People don't necessarily look at e-mail or faxes immediately when they're sent, and we have voicemail when we're not in the office, so why do people have to always be there for video?" asked Ann Earon, president of Skillman, N.J.-based Telemanangement Resources International, a videoconferencing consulting firm. "We'll get to the mode when the data we receive in video mode will be received when we want it and in the format we want it."

But will companies bite? Earon thinks so, eventually, but there are some kinks that likely will have to be worked out before corporations flock to the technology. The quality of the images needs to be high enough so as not to be distracting, for one.

"We need to learn a whole new language for how you stream video, so it's informative, keeps the attention of the audience and is done in such a way that people aren't turned off by four or five frames per second," she said. "We're getting there."

But the major roadblock to mass corporate acceptance, as always, is cost. While the streaming-video videoconferencing equipment by itself won't be particularly expensive, the ancillary costs--including network upgrades--could well pose a concern. "Cost is dropping all the time. The cost of streaming itself isn't the issue, it's setting up everything around it," Earon said.

The effect that such technology will have on meetings and group travel is debatable. The suppliers take what has become the standard party line: videoconferencing is a complement to, not a replacement for, travel, since face-to-face relationships always will need to be cultivated.

While streaming-video videoconferencing will have some applications that won't reduce meetings--for example, allowing employees to see certain parts of a high-level board meeting--there's also a good chance it could reduce some meetings travel. Why bring everyone in the office to a conference, if the key information can be edited and watched at the employee's convenience?

The meetings industry likely will have to wait and see how the new technology plays out before assessing its effect on meetings.

"The proof will be when you see some large companies actually adopting and applying this," Earon said. "We're not there yet. We're still in the piloting stage."

There are other videoconferencing technology advances still to come. Flanagan said the technology for wireless videoconferences will be available in the near future. "We'll be able to do over a wireless network many of the things we do now over a wired network, which will be particularly useful if you use a laptop one PC as opposed to a desktop," he said.

Smaller recent technological advances include the development of dynamic speaker-locating technology, which uses an array of tiny microphones to automatically direct the camera to the speaker. "Historically, someone in a videoconference had to act as the camera director," Flanagan said. "When someone was talking, the camera had to pull in, pull out, be on a single person or a pair or three or four. Now, with this technology, we are able to give intelligence to the cameras."

The most impressive feature of this technology, Flanagan said, is that the camera won't automatically dart to a person who makes a sound but isn't actually speaking. "It doesn't react to noises other than speech. If someone coughs or clears his throat, the camera doesn't automatically snap to that person only to have him shrug and have nothing to say. The camera doesn't move to muttered asides--'right,' 'okay'--either."

That's the kind of technological development that will increase the popularity of videoconferencing, Flanagan said, because it makes the process both simpler and less obtrusive. "We want to make it reliable and we want it to work with a very simple user interface so people don't get bogged down in the technology. We want it to be a satisfying experience, so people can transcend the technology to the point where it's almost transparent, so they concentrate and focus on the meeting.