---

In the last two years two great forces have risen in the Video Conferencing market, gaining fame and a rather considerable amount of fortune, and pushing video conferencing into the hugging hands of the enterprise masses.

These are the VC Titans – High Definition Video Conferencing (HDVC) and Telepresence (TP) – so similar in many ways, so different in other. Many have pondered who is better, which is the best solution. Finally the time has come to reach a conclusion. We are left with no alternative but to begin The Clash of the VC Titans: HDVC vs. TP. Who will reign the video conferencing market?

The Pre-Fight Report

High Definition Video Conferencing

The buzz in the locker rooms and around the water coolers around HDVC began around late 2004. In December 2005 LifeSize shipped the first ever HDVC system, and turned a rather sleepy market into a frenzy. This may seem today as a natural evolution of video conferencing, but leaping from CIF to 720p in just a few months was a real knock-out, both to vendors and consumers.

Suddenly everyone was talking High Def – 720p @ 30fps, everyone wanted H.264 – the latest in video coding technology, and everybody ran to buy HD video monitors (LCD, Plasma, DLP) to support HD reception.

Video conferencing in High Definition is a totally different ballgame compared to traditional Standard Definition. Bit rates are higher, resolution offer life size images, even data collaboration is finally natural. Not to mention CP…

All leading video conferencing vendors support HDVC today, and all the latest products – endpoints and bridges – offer at least 720p. It seems that HDVC is the de-facto standard in the video conferencing market today. It was considered to be the “best there is”, or at least until Telepresence came in the ring.

Telepresence

To an outsider, not familiar with the VC gym, TP may seem as the lost twin brother of HDVC, offering the same high definition life-size images as its famed relative. However, TP is all about the experience – The Telepresence room which offer studio quality video, lighting and acoustics; The TP camera staging, focusing on approximating correct eye contact; The TP experience which attempts to maintain a unified environment so that participants will feel in the same place even if they are connected via network.

TP is obviously targeting the high-end of the users spectrum at this stage, with a price tag of a $80K and up (much up). It is also targeting mainly inter-company communication, as TP “islands” currently offer limited or no interoperability with other conferencing systems, TP or HDVC.

Telepresence has been around since the 1990s, but it was the mega-corporations jumping on the TP wagon – HP in late 2005 with Halo, Cisco in 2007 with its TelePresence solution – which brought TP to every home (mainly via commercials and market hype).

Ever since Telepresence has been considered the future of video conferencing. With its multi-camera, multi-codec, multi-screen systems, 1080p resolution, high fidelity stereophonic sound and chic meeting rooms, TP is differentiating itself from HDVC, claiming to be superior.

The Clash of the VC Titans: HDVC vs. TP

Round 1: Quality

HDVC systems are different, both in nature and in quality. Combine them all together into a CP, and the result will seem even poorer. With TP you have a consistency of quality – the rooms are all the same, the camera placement, the lighting, the format. The conference participants seem to be sitting in the same room. This is a whole different experience, a whole different quality, and quality of experience is what truly matters.

That’s 1 point TP.

Round 2: Network

HDVC systems are deployed over enterprise WAN, point-to-point connections and best effort internet connections. Network problems dramatically affect the video quality and remain as the Achilles hill of the HDVC solution.

TP, on the other hand, is deployed over designated networks, known as COINS (Community Of Interest Network), that preserve strict Quality of Service (QoS) standards both within the enterprise and between enterprise locations. Therefore, TP video quality is close to perfect, and you don’t bother with those pesky artifacts.

That’s 2 points TP.

Round 3: IT Support

One of the pitfalls of today’s video conferencing systems is their (lack of) intuitivity. If you want to deploy video conferencing systems in your organization, you better get proper IT support. Every successful video conference depends on the IT guy that comes in early to make sure it works, and remains around to monitor the entire meeting.

With TP everything is simpler. Plug and Play was a key design element for TP vendors, and the results is quite impressive. Even someone without prior video conferencing experience can set up a TP conference and in no time.

That’s 3 points for TP.

Round 4: ‘In-Person’ Realism

For video conferencing to replace actual physical meetings the experience should be as close to 100% ‘In-Person’ realism. While HDVC has gone a step forward and offer life-size images of participants, the result is still far from fooling anyone to think the other participants are in the same room.

Telepresence, with its high emphasis on maintaining visual clues, focuses on letting you feel “as if you are there”. That is why governments, research institutes, healthcare organizations and other organizations have chosen TP as their platform of choice.

TP offers a high level of realism in terms of QoS, latency, throughput and jitter protection, and so can imitate in-person meetings better. The “setup” – TP rooms – takes that into a whole new level, and if you stop to think about it for a while, you can actually feel that there are no borders between you and other participants.

4 points TP.

Round 5: Overall Solution

Video conferencing is very important, but what customers are looking, bottom line, is a solution. Call it “Unified Communication” (UC), call it “The future” – Video conferencing is just one part of it.

So if you are deploying video conferencing, which is a great and natural first step, you better plan ahead. And planning ahead means buying from a vendor with a clear plan in the UC market. And currently no one is positioned better in the UC market than those TP giants, Cisco especially.

5 points TP. Knockout!!!

Judges call

And so TP wins with a convincing display of capabilities and benefits.

Long live the new VC emperor.

Hail Telepresence.