FaceTime is a really interesting move coming from Apple on their recently launched iPhone4. It is a mobile video telephony service which runs over IP, which by now probably have had more video calls done than mobile video calls done on all other existing handsets in the world in the same period of time. Instead of spending my time thinking of what else to write about this new service, here are a few interesting posts that I have found in
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 16th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
Yes. Video calling is growing. Yes consumer video chat is upon us. Yes Apple’s FaceTime service will increase demand and usage. No. it will not be enough. We’re still talking about communication islands. If you look at the state of VoIP today, it is pretty safe to say that it is growing nicely. It might not be apparent at first sight, but the reason it does is the ubiquity of PSTN. And that is the heart of the matter –
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 5th, 2010 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
In our “hidden challenges in developing HD video telephony products” webinar there was a really active Q&A session. As I promised after the webinar, I will be covering a few of the questions that were asked here at a bit more length. The first group of questions I want to tackle are those concerning H.323 and SIP: How important is H.323 for video telephony vs. SIP? Which one should I use? Using SIP and H.323 is a
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 28th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
There’s a lot to criticize about the new video calling service from Apple, FaceTime – that it isn’t interoperable at the moment, that it works only over WiFi, that you must have an iPhone 4 to be able to use the service, and so on. But there is something that FaceTime does for Apple that all the rest of its innovations in the latest release don’t: it separates it from the pack of Android devices. Think back on Apple’s previous
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 19th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
In the past couple of months we’ve hosted several webinars with TMCnet. This last one before the summer break was about the hidden challenges of developing HD visual communication products – a topic that is dear to me. As it so happens, I presented this webinar alongside Sagee Ben-Zedeff, the writer of my sister blog here, Video Over Enterprise. The premise of this webinar was that once people start developing an HD video communication terminal, they will focus on their
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 15th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
I’ve been an avid promoter of the Android OS up to the point of being ridiculed within the company – whenever someone has something good (or bad) to say about Android, they make sure I know about it. I don’t really mind. I think that Android has a place in the world, especially in 2010 and in the coming years – until something better pops up. For now, it is the best game in town if you are a handset
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 8th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Ever asked yourself when will video calling or even voice calling become something prevalent over the internet? I am afraid that the answer is “not so soon”. For this to happen, there are two distinct technologies that come to play: HTML5 (which is still in its early days) and Flash (which is installed on most web browsers worldwide). HTML5 It seems like the two missing pieces to get video calling going in a browser is having the ability to receive
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 5th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
June has been a really interesting month. It started off with the iPhone 4 FaceTime announcement and ended up with Cisco’s Cius announcement – from mobile video telephony for consumers to enterprise “personal telepresence”. It happens that I’ve published this month a few posts on other blogs about these subjects, so if these subjects interest you, check them out. The past, present and future of Mobile Video Telephony (Vision Mobile) I have met with Andreas Constantinou from Vision Mobile when
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 1st, 2010 | Filed under Miscellaneous
This is one of several posts about Apple’s iPhone FaceTime service. The reason for writing about it is because it is such an interesting issue: Apple, the king of usability, is trying to solve the user experience of mobile video telephony. What I want to deal with here is a slew of open questions about the openness of FaceTime. And to start, you should read this post by Ajit Jaokar about possible meanings of open. Which ones can be covered
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 24th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
Our latest webinar on TMCnet was called Voice and Video over IP Communications: Assessing and Improving User Experience. As we already know that video calling is happening and we know how it fits into the UC world, we decided to discuss on this webinar the different issues related to the quality of video calling. The focus was around video, although we did deal with audio as well. For video, there are two main approaches for assessing and improving the quality
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 23rd, 2010 | Filed under Uncategorized
