Cisco Is Opening Up Telepresence

I caught this story about Cisco's ever expanding telepresence game over at TMCnet. On the surface it looks like Cisco PR in action, but digging to the bottom I spied these two factoids:

Cisco TelePresence Recording Studio is an application that expands the application of Cisco TelePresence beyond meetings. It enables customers to create high-quality video messages or record presentations for instant, secure playback on Cisco TelePresence units. Another application, Cisco TelePresence Event Controls provides event managers with tools to produce internal and external Cisco TelePresence events.

High definition interoperability feature of Cisco TelePresence meetings enable inclusion of video from any standards-based high-definition videoconferencing system or standard-definition video conferencing, WebEx and other desktop video applications. This will enable organizations to scale collaboration and leverage existing resources. According to Charles Stucki, vice president and general manager of TelePresence Systems Business Unit at Cisco, the company is reinventing the way users can experience Cisco TelePresence.

So what does this mean? With the recording studio it means those people who don't take part in the conference call can observe it later. This is a key point to what we call "Speakers & Listeners" in my agency as we are strong believers that hearing from the horses mouth is far more important than some filtered version being recited back.

The second is far more important as it takes a stab (in a backhanded and subtle way) at Skype, which has been rapidly becoming the most used video conferencing app. Sorry, but Cisco said STANDARDS BASED so that rules the most used out, and in turn makes CounterPath's Eyebeam and Bria apps important, but also means desktop video devices like the VidTel supplied Grandstream becomes more important. (Note Scott Wharton, Vidtel's founder is a big proponent of standards based video as are the teams at SightSpeed and Counterpath obviously.)

Here's my guess how this all plays out. Cisco with their 802.11 skills, Flip with their HD handheld camera technology creates Video Anywhere as a concept allowing for the Flip HD cam to connect wirelessly via Wi-Fi to the net and reach a telepresence recording and event suite.

The time is coming. It's early on. But it will arrive and the face of video as we know it will change forever.

Comments

[Sean Lessman]

Hello,

I read your post/blog and wanted to add a few points that might add to the story. First, the recording application only works as a content creation engine, it does not record meetings today. It allows a user to sit at a Cisco Telepresence system and create a video message (as a point to point to the content recording engine) and then distribute. Maybe conference recording will come later, I am sure it will.

Second, the connection to 'standards based' products is through a RADVision/Cisco gateway that reduces the quality to VCR quality video (CIF) and telephone quality audio (G.711). So you lose the high definition of the Cisco Telepresence system when talking to standards compliant devices. This means you do not really connect to 'standards based HD' systems.

Hope this information is useful.

Sean Lessman
TANDBERG (www.tandberg.com)