Digicom Technology News

Apple made a little product announcement earlier this month. Something about a new iPad. It got mixed reviews: Some people expected more significant changes to the wildly popular tablet.

But AV professionals monitoring the iPad announcement need hear only three things about the new product: 4G, HD, and quad-core. Taken together, those iPad features describe an instantly viable, high-definition videoconferencing endpoint — one that’s likely to sell tens of millions of units and push an entire generation toward mobile videoconferencing, with all the technology design, systems engineering, and planning changes that entails.

Certainly, the new Apple iPad isn’t the first mobile computing device to support videoconferencing (or video calling, if you will) — high definition or otherwise. You’ll recall Tangberg’s Movi client (now incorporated into a platform Cisco Systems is calling Jabber), or even Cisco’s own Cius tablet, designed to support 720p videoconferencing. And vendors such as LifeSize (ClearSea), Polycom (RealPresence Mobile), Radvision (ScopiaMobile), and Vidyo (VidyoMobile) have made great strides in enabling high-quality videoconferencing on today’s mobile devices, limited as some of those devices might be in their ability to handle video. But when you consider that the iPad now has the processing power to crank through H.264 and other streams, a screen and camera that support 720p and 1080p, a wireless network connection (two, if you count Wi-Fi) that offers the necessary bandwidth for HD video links, and that it’s already backordered, it’s definitely time for AV pros, their clients, and their IT counterparts to start building systems that support pervasive video conferencing. Because it’s one thing to Skype from a smartphone; it’s another  to patch into a telepresence room from a new iPad or similarly powered mobile device while sitting in an airport lounge.

“A lot of people are still unaware that you can do mobile videoconferencing,” says Matt McNeil, CTS-D®, chief marketing officer at Conference Technologies. “They think you’ll get the quality of Skype rather than what they’re used to with their room videoconferencing systems. Others are surprised at how good the mobile technology has gotten in the last year.”

The age of mobile videoconferencing is officially upon us, thanks in no small part to the iPad. And it will rely on the convergence of AV and IT like no other technology before it. Why? Because AV professionals still own the videoconferencing room experience, but IT will always have responsibility over the computing devices — mobile and otherwise — that workers use.

According to a recent survey of videoconferencing users by Wainhouse Research, 36 percent of respondents said their organizations had already deployed videoconferencing-enabled tablets; 16 percent were actually engaging in mobile videoconferencing; and half said their organization planned to test or deploy it within the year.

“This is the whole new paradigm that everyone’s talked about,” says John Vitale, Vice President of Products at AVI-SPL. “Within the last year, mass adoption of new devices has started driving mobile videoconferencing.”

If you would like to to know more about video conferencing, please contact Digicom.

Article from infoComm.