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16 Feb 2010
Polycom has announced that it will support H.264 video compression technology to reduce the bandwidth requirements for videoconferencing and unified communication technologies by up to 50 per cent.
The company said that cutting bandwidth requirements will help drive a wider range of video deployments, and create a network effect that will deliver greater customer benefits to small, medium and large firms.
H.264 uses coding efficiency innovations that allow full-motion high-definition video to run on bandwidth requirements starting from just 512Kbit/s, and full-motion DVD-quality standard-definition video starting as low as 128Kbit/s.
Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions at Polycom, explained that the company is trying to address the key barriers to adoption for visual communication through a standards-based approach that will drive industry growth.
"Businesses of all sizes and across all industries want the productivity and cost-saving benefits of visual communication, and we are trying to drive down the cost of ownership to make it affordable and accessible to a broader range of customers," he said.
The reduced bandwidth requirements could also serve as a catalyst for broader video deployments, delivering greater customer benefits to help push the use of unified communications within the business environment, the firm said.
Higher video quality at lower bandwidth will also drive greater video use among mobile and home office workers, according to Polycom, and increased adoption overall will drive greater collaboration between companies.
The firm also announced the launch of two new products in its telepresence portfolio. The HDX 6000 View provides a full-featured high-definition room system, while the Polycom HDX 9000 1080 offers 1080p video resolution.
The moves represent Polycom's continued attempts to take on Cisco in the videoconferencing space after joining forces with Juniper Networks in January to offer cost-effective and reliable telepresence and videoconferencing services.
Cisco itself launched a new interoperability standard to drive take up of the service among smaller businesses, and previewed its TelePresence to the home solution in Barcelona last month.
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Vidyo
Polycom's announcement (Feb 16, 2010), that they plan to deliver an SVC-based solution later in 2010, is validation from one of the largest video conferencing solution providers that SVC is the going forward video coding standard to ?address reduced bandwidth requirements, error concealment during packet loss, enhanced scalability for multipoint calling.? Vidyo, who is now on its second generation of SVC implementation and refinement, is happy to see that Polycom has plans to adopt Vidyo?s visionary choice of SVC as the way to utilize low cost bandwidth, including best efforts networks such as the Internet. We believe, however, that to fully harness the benefits of SVC, the implementation must eliminate the MCU in favor of an intelligent packet routing architecture, rather than just bolting SVC to an outdated transcoding architecture. The Polycom announcement is likely to be just the first in a series of announcements this year by other video conferencing vendors that will state their intentions to move to SVC in 2010. For organizations now contemplating growing their video conferencing infrastructure, this announcement is a bellwether that buying anything but SVC-based hardware is not a good forward-looking investment choice. While the legacy video conferencing vendors may tout backward compatibility through a transcoding MCU, the real benefits of moving to SVC are lower latency and higher resiliency over any network, resulting in much higher quality, natural interaction video meetings in which no MCU is involved. Organizations should be forewarned that some suppliers may try to convince customers that it is safer to migrate slowly, when the real challenge is how to unleash video conferencing from its confinement of limited capacity. There are strong business drivers building a demand for greater access and mobility of video conferencing endpoints. An SVC-based architecture that eliminates the MCU will allow for low cost expansion of the infrastructure to meet expanding usage.
Posted by: Vidyo 18 Feb 2010