A standard sell

Communications News, May, 1998 by Morris Edwards

New operating standards are making it easier for business to embrace desktop videoconferencing.

Until recently, desktop video-conferencing had limited utility in corporate America. Transmission costs were astronomical, picture quality poor, and implementation a nightmare due to the lack of multi-vendor standards.

During the past year, though, vendors have begun offering a variety of products complying with a new standard that promises full interoperability. More efficient compression techniques have improved picture quality, and the Internet has slashed transmission costs, paving the way for desktop video to become a staple of corporate communications.

Dataquest expects North American video hardware revenues to grow by 25% this year, from about $400 million to $500 million. By next year, Elliot Gold, president of Altadena, Calif., consultancy Telespan, believes that most computers will come equipped for videoconferencing.

COLLABORATION TOOL

The economics are compelling. Desktop video terminals with built-in camera, video coder/decoder, and audio system may cost as little as $1,000. Kit add-ons for Windows-based machines sell for under $250, including digital camera and audio/video capture card. Silicon Vision's Digital Video PC Camera Kit and 3Com's Big Picture Kit, for example, are priced at $249 each.

Among the more popular desktop videoconferencing units, PictureTel's LiveLAN 3.0 sells for $1,495, while Intel's Business Videoconferencing System (BVS) 3.0 costs $1,199. They both offer highly rated audio and video quality and include extensive collaboration features.

They also comply with the H.323 standard, which allows for desktop video broadcasts over corporate LANs, intranets, and other IP networks (see sidebar). In addition, their support of H.320 provides access to room-based videoconferencing systems as well as IP-based connections.

For data collaboration, the BVS 3.0 uses Microsoft's T.120-compliant NetMeeting software, while PictureTel has its own LiveShare package with similar features.

Microsoft offers its NetMeeting software free as a download, and makes its software development kits freely available to vendors, so most of the big desktop video players either include popular features such as MeetingPoint in their products or insure interoperability with other NetMeeting capabilities.

Another software vendor, White Pine Software of Nashua, N.H., allows any computer user with a cheap digital camera to participate in group videoconferences from the desk. Its Meeting Point Conference Server 3.0 supports not only clients using its Enhanced CUSeeMe videoconferencing software, but also any client running the H.323 and T.120 protocols, including Microsoft's NetMeeting.

Acting as a conferencing host, the server allows clients to communicate over LANs or IP networks with any combination of voice, video, and text chat. Clients can limit their send and receive rates, which lightens the network load but impairs the video performance. For busy conferencing sites, MeetingPoint supports multiple conference servers and multiple conferences per server.

STREAMING FORCE

Microsoft is also becoming a force in streaming video, having acquired one vendor, VXtreme, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., and bought a 10% stake in another, Progressive Networks, Inc. of Seattle, Wash.

Streaming is a technique that allows users to play content while they are still receiving it, rather than waiting for the entire file to be downloaded. Because it provides no feedback on the congestion it might be causing, streaming video can create horrendous network bottlenecks, threatening mission-critical applications.

Fortunately, live and on-demand audio and video capabilities are currently used on less than 1% of Web sites. Even so, Microsoft and other vendors are aware of the problem and are working to ease network managers' anxieties about supporting streaming media applications on their Web sites.

Netscape and RealNetworks, for instance, have joined forces in creating the real time streaming protocol (RTSP), which is awaiting approval by the Internet Engineering Task Force. RTSP provides new compression and management capabilities, including a means of reducing network latency when users start, stop, fast-forward, or rewind streamed video. Another proposed standard, IP multicast, conserves bandwidth by allowing a number of users to tap into one stream.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is building VXtreme's compression and network delivery technology into its NetShow 3.0 Internet video server, due in early summer. The server will use "intelligent" streaming, which is the ability to encode a file at two bit rates so that the server can feed the stream at the lower rate if the modem connection is slow. Also, network managers will be able to limit the server's output.

Working with 60 other companies, Microsoft has also developed the advanced streaming format (ASF) to handle multiple media types in a single streaming file. An ASF file could include text, graphics, animation, audio and video, all synchronized in a single presentation.