Video conferencing today

Few VC deployments in the world can match the scale at the international organization for nuclear and particle physics research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Rachel Nielsen alluded to this fact in her 16 September 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal. According to her, a single video session at CERN can include hundreds of scientists […]

Few VC deployments in the world can match the scale at the international organization for nuclear and particle physics research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Rachel Nielsen alluded to this fact in her 16 September 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal. According to her, a single video session at CERN can include hundreds of scientists from all over the world, and as many as 300 sessions could take place per day, involving tens of thousands of scientists. The price tags for VC services vary widely, from under a thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At the low end of VC products is EVC100, which is manufactured by the Taiwanese company AVer Information, Inc., and costing approximately one thousand dollars. The device comes with a wide-angle camera, microphone for the conference table and a codec for video communications. Additional TV screens allow the conference room to be used for video chats. Another product, developed by Vidyo, Inc., can link hundreds of participants in one session. Each screen displays up to 8 people, and multiple screens can be linked in the same room. This system, according to Nielsen, goes for $4,500.
You can choose to download software off the net, and use the standard facilities in your laptop or desktop (webcam, microphone, speakers) and high-speed Internet, to realize a VC session, if you do not care for a video room and/or cannot afford special equipment.  Products such as ooVoo, Google+ Hangout are examples. They can respectively allow 12 ad 10 devices to be linked. These two products are free and include screen-sharing capabilities, whereby documents on your screen can be shown on others’ screens. Both are supported by the common PC operating systems – Windows and Mac.  
Serdar Yegulalp reviewed seven low-cost video-conferencing services in the 18 December 2012 issue of Computerworld magazine. These services are: Adobe Connect, Brother OmniJoin, Cisco WebEx Meetings, Citrix GoTo Meeting, Google+ Hangouts, Microsoft Lync, and Skype 5.10. Below is a fast take on his findings.
Adobe Connect is consistent across platforms (Macs and Windows) because it’s been authored entirely in Flash. This also leads to a problem: you can exceed the limits of Flash’s implementation in a given browser. Chrome has issues for this reason. Connect users are divided into three groups (hosts, presenters and participants), each with its own roles, responsibilities, and privilege. The panels or “pods” displayed on-screen (i.e., the video windows, the attendee list, the chat box, etc.) are all replicated at each user’s end. You can use pre-created arrangements of the panels or create your own. The video chat portion of Connect has follow-focus (i.e., switching the video feed so that whoever is speaking is given prominence). Yegulalp reported a significant lag (several seconds) between a speaker in New York and another in California, while audio and video tended to drift out of sync!
The free tier of Cisco’s WebEx, although with minimal features, works extremely well, allowing three people per meeting with one host, standard-definition video, and phone dial-in. Interactivity is limited to white-boarding, document- and desktop-sharing, and a shared uploadable file repository of size 250MB. More advanced tiers exist, including support for up to 500 people, with a custom price quote at the high end of the tier spectrum.
Citrix’s GoToMeeting is aimed at professionals. There is no free tier, and the service starts at $49 per month for up to 25 participants. There is a variety of other plans, with increased number of attendees, more features, and higher costs. GoToMeeting allows you to include people who only have a phone, and allows you to share your screen with other participants or letting them take control of your system. You can schedule meetings with the system, and record session activities into a file. You can join in from Mac, Windows PC, or an Android or iOS device. The system supports white-boarding, which allows you to draw on a whiteboard, as well as annotate any shared window or item on your desktop.
PC World Online recently reported on the ratings of 40 VC services. Those that scored at least 4 points out of a total of 5 are: VidiTel (4), Vibe Phone (4), Fly Conferencing Suite (4), Lynda.com (4), Skype 5.3 for Windows (4.5), TOKBOX AIR (4), Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional (4.5), Go ToMeeting 3.0 (4.5), SightSpeed (4), WebEx Meeting Center, (4), and MSN Messenger (4). (Scores are shown in parenthesis.)
Finally, the PC World article has this to say about Cisco WebEx Conferencing Services: “Owning over 60 percent of the market, WebEx is the Web conferencing service to beat. The new version of WebEx Meeting Center is fully loaded and earns our Editors’ Choice hands down.” It continues: “Of all the services we evaluated, it offers the best integration with Microsoft Office. A special download adds a drop-down menu to all your Office applications, so you can crank up an instant conference that shares whatever document and application you’re working in. You can also start a conference to share any file in any application by right-clicking on the filename and choosing Share in WebEx Meeting, or start a One Click Meeting using a desktop icon.”
The bottom line of this article is that there are numerous video conferencing products and services for business meetings, with price tags from under a thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars.