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Video conferencing has been tipped for the top for some time now, and finally its day has arrived. Here, Mike Entwistle, Managing Director for CCOMM Ltd, who started in the conferencing consulting space explains how the combination of the burgeoning ‘green’ movement, improved technologies, lower prices and a new generation that is ready and able to embrace video means that video conferencing will be the ubiquitous tool for communication in the 21st Century.

40 years ago the first video call took place, when AT&T introduced the Picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair in America. Viewed as a fascinating curiosity at the time, it never actually became popular and was too expensive to be practical for most consumers. At its peak, the Picturephone service had only 500 subscribers, and the service faded away by the mid 1970’s.

Now, nearly four decades later, videoconferencing has come of age, with manufacturers such as Polycom, Tandberg and Life Size routinely selling tens of thousands of units a year worldwide. It’s a growing market. In 2005 video conferencing was worth about .15 billion globally, according to Frost & Sullivan. Now the market is expected to reach .1 billion by 2010, growing at a compound annual rate of 22.1 per cent. Another research firm Gartner is even more bullish, projecting the video conferencing industry to be worth .8 billion by 2011.

With the reduction in the prices of <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”http://www.telcom-data.com/video-conferencing.aspx” title=”Video Conferencing Systems” target=”_blank”>video conferencing systems</a>, this technology is gaining a faster popularity and a steep rise in demand. Earlier video conferencing technology was very expensive and could be afforded only by the big and some medium sized organizations. But the reduced prices have now brought this solution well within the reach of organizations of all sizes.

Video conferencing microphone and other equipments have now become so cheap that these equipments are being used as standard equipments in the conference rooms of almost all the organizations located in the different parts of the world. It facilitates the users to get connected to each other and communicate via audio and visuals. The distance between the different parties do not act as an obstacle in the video conferences.

<a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”http://www.telcom-data.com/video-conferencing.aspx” title=”Video Conferencing Solutions” target=”_blank”>Video conferencing solutions</a> help organizations to cut down travel expenses. It also saves time and facilitates to take quick decisions and actions during times of emergency. Therefore, over a short period of time, the expenditure incurred on the video conferencing equipments and services are recovered from the many benefits which it offers.

One of the most compelling cases for video conferencing technology has to be the reduction in travel costs.

Many businesses increasingly view travel as a drain on time and budgets. You can understand why when most business travellers admit that only half of the time spent on a business trip can be classed as productive working time. Not only could you reduce your business travel bills by up to 30%, but you could also improve employee productivity by cutting back on idle hours.

Allied to the reduction in travel time and costs is the environmental argument. Video conferencing uses little energy – no petrol, diesel or aviation fuel, only a few units of electricity. The technology can help the business reduce their carbon footprint and environmental impact. To demonstrate the point, a UK environment minister gave a keynote speech at the Climate Change Conference in Sydney via video conferencing. This saved 60 hours of travel time and 6.2 tons of CO2 emissions.

Your business could benefit in other ways too. Video conferencing gives you the flexibility to hold ad-hoc meetings; you don’t have to plan weeks in advance. This flexibility could speed up decision-making and response times, which will also benefit your customers.

Desktop video conferencing is the consumer version of the “picturephone” services used by large corporations. If the analysts are correct, desktop videoconferencing is set to take off. Technology such as VOIP can be used in conjunction with desktop videoconferencing to enable face-to-face business meetings without leaving the desktop. Desktop PC videoconferencing promises to make this a reality, although it remains to be seen whether there is widespread enthusiasm for video calling. We have everything you need for audio, video and desktop conferencing. We expect that the roll-out of desktop conferencing kit shouldn’t take anywhere near as long as that.

The vastly improved technologies, in particular high-quality desktop options, and the productivity and cost benefits make an overwhelmingly powerful case for flexible conferencing. As broadband connections increase, expect to see desktop videoconferencing blossom. As a result, desktop conferencing is not yet widely implemented for business and educational use. You can meet face-to-face with colleagues and clients using desktop video conferencing and real-time audio conferencing. Room-based vs desktop conferencing Video conferencing uses telecommunications of audio and video to bring people at different sites together for a meeting. Desktop video conferencing is a form of communication and as such it utilizes one of the communication field’s favorite words: bandwidth. The quality of the service provided by desktop video conferencing is limited by the amount of bandwidth available in the chosen communications channel.

Many to Many web video conferencing is a combination of two web casting services named video conferencing and web conferencing. Video conferencing means collaboration of one or more than one people at same time while sharing sounds and videos with each other live. Web conferencing is an expansion pack of video conferencing. It includes not only live audio and video conferencing but also remote desktop sharing for sending or receiving documents, files and folders from one pc to another. Many to Many term is used when people are interconnect with each other in such a way that all participants can see, listen and speak with each other independently. It is just like a gathering in single room where everyone has independent access to each other. In a business meeting, business partners and co workers collaborate with each other to analyze their business objectives, sharing reports and making new business plans. When someone talks, all are able to listen and discuss at any point. This is a routine business meeting is real world. Many to Many web video conferencing is the best alternate of routine business meeting by providing virtual collaboration of business personnel through internet.

Why many to many web conferencing :

Modern business operations all share the same rapidly depleting commodity: Time. When time is leveraged, productivity and output invariably increases within a business organization. Technology continues to provide workers and businesses with new tools to help leverage time. Video conferencing could prove to be one of the most important time leveraging business tools of the 21st century.

Once a luxury for only the largest companies, video conferencing is beginning to change the landscape of how businesses communicate with both employees and clients. In its simplest form, video conferencing allows two individuals to be thousands of miles apart yet still effectively communicate as if they were in the same room. Systems in use today can now connect multiple parties across multiple continents – in real time with excellent and high quality video and audio.

The Origins of Video Conferencing

Video conferencing capabilities originated in the 1970s. Similar to every other technology in use today, video conferencing has changed dramatically since first being developed. Early proponents of video conferencing technology had no standards or protocols to rely on. This fact made a teleconference via video an expensive proposition – one that only huge companies and government agencies could afford. In a time where cell phones were still a decade away for most consumers and businesses, video teleconferences were few and far between.