Archive for April, 2008
Not many people know that H.323, the umbrella under which the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) defined the protocols for the transmission of unified communication over packet networks (back when it was simply called “audio-visual communication”), was conceived in the good old ISDN days. Nowadays, H.323 is mainly used for video conferencing over IP networks, which introduces new challenges that were not present before.. One major challenge is sending media that requires high bandwidth (especially since the mighty HD became
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By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 29th, 2008 | Filed under Innovation, Video Conferencing
“Beam me up, Scotty” is probably the most quoted phrase in science fiction television. Taken from cult TV series Star Trek, which first aired more than four decades ago, this command from Captain James Kirk to his transporter chief, Montgomery Scott, was a cue for “Scotty” to transport Captain Kirk back to the starship Enterprise. Star Trek heroes get “beamed up”. More than 40 years have passed and yet teleportation hasn’t become more of a reality than it
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By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 22nd, 2008 | Filed under Innovation, Video Conferencing
If you haven’t been using video conferencing, CP may mean nothing to you. CP, or Continuous Presence, is the most popular mode of display in a video conference. It means that some of the participants in the conference (or all of them) are displayed simultaneously in a mosaic (also known as “Hollywood Squares“), thus enabling each participant to see all of the other participants, as if they were in an actual (physical) meeting. Hollywood squares - the game,
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By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 15th, 2008 | Filed under High Definition, Video Conferencing
Last Thursday (27.3) I was passing through the center of Tel-Aviv which was in the midst of preparations for “Earth Hour Tel-Aviv“. If you missed the much-publicized blackout - when cities around the world turned off the lights in homes and offices to inspire action regarding climate change - I can tell you that the view (as seen on TV) was astounding. The Earth Hour campaign video The “Earth Hour” campaign is very popular. However what I was thinking
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By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 10th, 2008 | Filed under Collaboration, Video Conferencing
It seems that everyone is talking about Telepresence these days. In case you have been staying on a different planet for the past year or so, let me give you a brief introduction: Based on an idea by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the famous film producer and CEO of DreamWorks, HP introduced a telepresence solution called Halo two years ago. Halo was a point-to-point, interactive visual communication solution that takes traditional video conferencing one notch higher, especially in terms of size (picture
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By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 7th, 2008 | Filed under Telepresence, Video Conferencing
downloadsquad has recently announced that YouTube are planning to introduce live video in 2008. This is a very exciting piece of news, even if the announcement hasn’t been confirmed by the “Tubesters” themselves. The fact that YouTube, the #1 video sharing website, may even be considering live video broadcasting is surprising, and may yet prove that live video broadcasting is not just hype. Then and now: Steve Mann (left), Justine Kan (right) The best example of live video
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By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | April 1st, 2008 | Filed under Innovation, Video Streaming
