posted 04 October 2005 11:05 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Ruprecht:
It's great to see Tandberg pulling together these solutions into a coherent platfrom offering (Polycom should take note) and they should be out there making a noise but it would be nice to see something truely new, Starbak have been doing this for ages and Codian seem to be looking at the bigger picture with IP-VCR.

Tandberg have done a 'me too' and apparently 'invented' conference streaming and archiving in an unprecedented way through acquisition!?!?!

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Hi,

I think there are some details that may be missing. TANDBERG does not have plans to 'me too' anything but instead recognized the great technology that Ectus had and how it would fit into our bigger solution.

If you mix the video endpoints with our video infrastructure (supporting H.460 firewall traversal and 3G) with the technology from Ectus you get a very nice possible solution that you do not find anywhere else:

1. Create content from anywhere (on the corporate lan, behind a firewall, from home, any hotel, anywhere).

2. Make content available to any video system, pc or 3G capable handset -- anywhere. Literally millions of devices.

3. Capture native H.239 from any capable device bypassing the need to upload slidesets to the solution. This maintains the same user experience as you would find in vtc, minimizing the learning curve.

4. All controlled, managed and scheduled by TMS.

These are a few highlights that I hope show that we are not doing a 'me too'. If you compare boxes, it may appear that way, if you compare solutions/applications I hope you see how exciting this is.

Sean

posted 04 October 2005 01:11 PM               

Even more impressive was their web application that allowed "bookmarking", search, and a nice interface for collaboration with snippets of video from these presentations. Folks in the room were impressed how they made it "work" in a learning environment.

I then had a great chat with one of their engineers about their work with H323 and how their solution solved some problems that they identified with the OpenH323 project ... they seemed to really know their stuff.

I have some customers that I would like to introduce this technology to ... especially if they have integrated H264 and cross-browser support into their product line.

It looks like this technology could be competitive with ConferServ (who has an integration with Tandberg already) as well as webcasting companies like Sonic Foundry and Accordent (although I am not sure if these companies have any sort of H323 integration).

One downside to all of these vendors is that they all seem to be representing the presenter's data as static JPG images. One problem with this is that it does not capture animations, transitions, or desktop data where motion is important. Another problem is that it can't be multicast or managed via RTSP and UDP so that it can effectively scale beyond a few hundred users in one network.

Another downside is that most of these products are windows-based but I seem to be one of the few folks in the rich media space that are bothered by this ... oh well.

In general I am very excited about both the Polycom and the Tandberg announcements with regard to digital video archiving and streaming ... the webcasting market has been stymied by a lack of standards and ephemeral vendors ... having two big companies that support standards for video communications in the webcasting space should help us all in the long run.

posted 06 October 2005 02:42 PM            

When is someone gonna make you head of marketing and get out there shouting about things???

The way you put it makes me want to go shopping ;0)