Video Calling From the Sofa

Video telephony as a technology is making its way to the consumer market. The next step is the set top boxes and the world of IPTV.Today, people around the world can use video calling on millions of 3G mobile handsets in Europe and Asia. There are issues with pricing, usability and quality, but I can never have enough of the smiles of my baby girl on my 3G phone. Video telephony on mobile handsets is just the beginning - in the past 2 years, cable operators around the world have been placing this kind of a feature in their wish list to set top box manufacturers.

Chipset vendors such as Texas Instruments and Intel have come out with reference designs on their latest platforms for set top boxes that are capable of handling video telephony - not an easy feat. At a time when interactivity is the name of the game for TV, video telephony makes a lot of sense.

Here you can see such a demo, done over Intel’s consumer electronics platform:

This specific reference design has been unveiled by Intel at their Intel Developer Forum in Beijing 2007. It currently supports video telephony service.

I am sure we can expect to see some kind of an “interactive suite” that adds a presence dimension to video calling, as well as supplementary services. Companies such as Thomsonis doing something similar, where their latest IPTV demonstrations provide caller information and voice mail services right from the set-top-box.

You can learn more about it here:

• Demo page on our website
• Video telephony for IPTV in this whitepaper