Video Conferencing In An Instant (Message)

By Sagee Ben-Zedeff

Categories: Innovation, Video Conferencing

February 23rd, 2010

Just a few weeks ago, in my 2010 Predictions post, I’ve written that the Instant Messaging (IM) world – Skype, Messenger/Communicator, Google Talk, etc. – and the Video Conferencing (VC)  world – the meeting room systems, executive systems, desktop clients – are about to be merged into one experience – Visual Communications.

You can see many indications to this trend, coming from all over the place, with IM vendors moving strongly into video and video conferencing vendors integrating IM capabilities. But the real deal here is not just integrating both IM and VC on the same system, but supplying the user with a unified experience, where instant messaging can easily be escalated to video calling and a video call can become a video conference easily and intuitively.

If I look at my daily use of these means of communications, IM has become the de-facto standard to start a conversation, or at least verify that the person on the other line is available, as it holds presence information. Now I have a variety of options:

• Continue with the IM chat
• Move the conversation to the telephone – this requires calling (again)
• Escalate the IM chat to video – most IM clients support that today, assuming the other side has video capabilities too.

This makes a lot of sense in the 1-on-1 call scenario, as all options don’t require that much of work to setup – a phone call or a video call. But when it comes to a 1-to-many scenario, things look a bit different – audio conference using the telephone is not trivial and the experience is not that great; upgrading the IM chat to a video conference is usually a BIG headache, as most IM clients do not support currently multi-party conferencing, not to mention that “traditional” VC users can not join the conference.

Initiating a Video Conference from the Chat box

So on one hand, instant messaging has become a primary means of communications (and more so – initiation of communications); on the other hand, the mechanism to launch audio and video conferences from the IM clients is missing.

This is exactly where a new patent, U.S. patent 7,631,039, granted to RADVISION on December and announced publicly yesterday, comes in handy. The RADVISION patent allows users to initiate such conferences in the comfort and ease of their IM clients, using the existing address book and nothing more.

The patent covers the initiation and support of audio and video conferencing using instant messaging.  It allows a user to initiate a video conference from his IM directory or from an on-going IM session.  Such a video conference can be initiated in response to an instant message sent between two or more clients, and participants can then join the conference by any of several possible communication means.  For example, a user may join a conference using a desktop client or a dedicated high definition room system, using standard protocols such as SIP or H.323.

Visual Communications (illustration).

An interesting piece of trivia regarding the patent is that it was drafted a few years ago (2001), and it foreseen quite remarkably the current trends in the real-time communications industry. I believe that in the upcoming months, the fruits of this innovative way of thinking by RADVISION will prove to be both extremely useful and productive for both instant messaging and video conferencing users.

I believe the IM and VC worlds are destined to merge, and when the combined experience – visual communications – becomes a must-have means of communications, the ease-of-use and effectiveness offered by this new idea will be greatly appreciated.