Video Conferencing: Does It Work Yet?

The technology has improved greatly, and film impresarios have built a truly visionary system Not even companies fully committed to using video conferencing as a cost saving and productivity-boosting measure would claim that the experience is remotely as good as actually being there. Small screens, jerky, fuzzy video and tinny audio that doesn’t synch with the video have all conspired in the past to destroy the illusion of being virtually in the same room with people at the other end of a conferencing connection. The subtleties of non-verbal communication-the very thing video was supposed to restore to the conferencing experience-are too often lost as a result. And the artificial meeting protocols required to ensure that people can be clearly heard and seen when they speak often stifle the free flow of communication. Can video conferencing ever rise above these shortcomings? Equipment vendors say their products have improved so much in the last few years that most if not all of the technical glitches have simply gone away. Certainly the technology has improved, as we’ll see, but we doubt those improvements remove all the shortcomings. The experience of one company, though, Hollywood’s DreamWorks Animation, clearly shows that if you throw enough resources at the problem, it is possible to make video conferencing very nearly as good as being there. DreamWorks is the company founded 10 years ago by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen to create feature movies using computer generated (CG) animation. It is responsible for the Shrek series and this summer’s Madagascar. As the company’s chief technology officer, Ed Leonard, puts it, "We want to tell great stories but tell them with never before seen images." Virtual StudioTwo years ago, at the insistence of DreamWorks head honcho Katzenberg, Leonard and his team developed an immersive collaboration system that the company calls Virtual Studio Collaboration (VSC). It involved building matching meeting rooms in DreamWorks’ northern and southern California production centres, fitted with broadcast-quality video equipment, floor-to-ceiling flat panel television screens-including high definition screens in some rooms-multiple cameras and studio quality audio systems. Most is off-the-shelf equipment. DreamWorks also developed software to integrate the technology and create the kind of seamless, just-like-being-there conferencing experience it wanted. "There is no ‘On’ button," Leonard says. "You just walk into the room and the people are there." Participants sit in rooms that are mirror images of each other to create the illusion of actually sitting across a table. The remote participants appear life size. The technology is virtually invisible. "The fidelity of the video and audio means you can have multiple overlapping conversations," Leonard says. "If someone leans over to whisper to their neighbour, it can be heard at the other end. The natural dynamics mean it’s like you’re in one room together. There is no primary and secondary site, there are no delay dynamics, and all of this means there is a real opportunity for everybody to be involved." The cost to develop VSC, it goes without saying, was enormous-"an order of magnitude more expensive" than the high-end systems offered by established video conferencing vendors such as Polycom Inc. and Tandberg, Leonard says. He hints that it would cost in the range of $300,000 per room, although this is likely only for the audio-video equipment. Ongoing costs are also at least an order of magnitude above what most Polycom and Tandberg users spend. According to Polycom vertical segment product manager Michele Damerau, the most often dialed bandwidth for video conferences today-"by far"-is 384 kilobits per second (Kbps). To get the quality of video and audio DreamWorks needed, it uses "multiple 6 megabit" channels, Leonard says. Why This Expense? Creative work involves very "intimate" processes, Leonard says. In a meeting called so that artists can pitch storyboards for new scenes to a director, for example, the interplay between the participants often involves subtle forms of non-verbal communication that all parties must be able to pick up on. And it’s vital that the interaction be as natural and free flowing as possible to ensure all viewpoints are heard and that the expensive creative talent on hand is exploited to the full. The company has even set up remote collaborative film editing facilities using the same technologies so that a director at one studio can work with assistants and editors at another. The creative people involved didn’t at first believe it could work because the interaction and "creative nuances" in the process are so subtle. But it did work, Leonard says. A key issue for DreamWorks is being able to "leverage" and husband its creative talent. If a project that is primarily being handled out of the company’s Redwood City studio in northern California needs to accelerate its schedule to meet deadlines, for example, the company would like to be able to temporarily bring employees from its Hollywood studio into the project. But they’re typically needed for too short a time to make it practical to physically move 30 or 40 people from one place to the other and find and pay for accommodations for them. Even flying from Los Angeles to Redwood City to pitch a storyboard takes a full day for, as Leonard says, "about two productive hours." DreamWorks has also been working with a studio in England on a Wallace & Gromit movie due in theatres in October. At one point, Katzenberg and his entourage were flying from California to the UK for meetings and reviews every six weeks. "We’d spend two days there and that was for eight hours of productivity," Leonard says. "And it would just kill us. It’d take a week to recover." Those meetings are now handled using VSC. When DreamWorks began the VSC project, Leonard talked to all of the mainstream video conferencing vendors. He was unimpressed. "We need something that works, this doesn’t," he says of the technology and implementations he saw. Polycom and others told him he was swimming against the current, that most users were looking for ways to reduce video conferencing costs even further. "They told us, ‘Our customers are balking at $50,000 systems and you want to build one for $250,000.’" Leonard believes video conferencing users and vendors aren’t thinking about it the right way. The technology DreamWorks developed doesn’t compete with the mainstream video conferencing vendors, he says. It competes with airlines. "This technology is fundamentally changing the way we do business. What those vendors don’t provide is an experience that allows me not to have to get on a plane." The DreamWorks solution does provide that experience. It’s expensive, but if it eliminates the cost of travel and, much more importantly, the associated lost productivity for CEOs or CFOs in big companies, it will pay for itself fairly quickly, he says. Leonard also notes that equipment and communications costs are coming down so fast that VSC-like systems will soon be within reach of even small and mid-size companies. Not every enterprise needs the kind of video conferencing experience DreamWorks does, but Hewlett-Packard Co., the studio’s principal technology partner and a contributor to the VSC system, believes there is a market for it. In partnership with DreamWorks, it is now marketing the VSC concept and technology as Halo. It has built public Halo rooms in London, Barcelona, Israel and Singapore, and is building others, including a planned room in Toronto. "It’s like fax," Leonard says. "The more people have them, the more interesting it gets." The MainstreamIf you can’t afford or justify anything as expensive as Halo, there are plenty of more affordable options. Will they provide a good enough experience to allow you to avoid at least some travel? Leonard suggests that mainstream video conferencing products work fine "so long as you’re not interested in seeing reactions, not interested in a full dialogue and not interested in picking up nuances of non-verbal communication." Users with less exacting standards than DreamWorks certainly use, or attempt to use, mainstream room video conferencing products for critical communications. In fact, the market for room systems is growing fairly briskly. Surprisingly, it outpaces the market for desktop systems, about which there is much more hype, notes Polycom’s Damerau. She claims that quarterly unit sales of Polycom room systems have approximately doubled since 2000, reaching approximately 15,000 units in each quarter this year. Wainhouse Research released a report last year that showed the video conferencing market returning to strong growth -of 25% or more a year-after a few years of slumping growth. Wainhouse predicts that sales of video conferencing room systems will grow from approximately $530 million in 2003 to over $1 billion in 2008. This is despite gradual declines in equipment selling prices and technology shifts enabling lower cost solutions, Wainhouse notes. Mainstream video conferencing vendors say their technology has improved immeasurably in just the few years since DreamWorks developed VCS. One big advance was the introduction about two years ago of products using H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10. H.264 is a high compression digital video codec standard written jointly by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) and the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). It supersedes H.263 (MPEG2) and H.323 (IP) and in effect halves the bandwidth required for a given quality of video. "That was a major jumping off point for video conferencing," says Tandberg chief marketing officer Toni Lee Rudnicki. Polycom last year introduced its ProMotion Video technology that transmits 60 fields of interlaced video and supposedly offers twice the resolution of previous systems that transmitted only 30 fields per second. It produces an experience that is "very like watching TV," according to Polycom literature. It’s offered on mid-range and high-end Polycom systems, including the company’s top-of-the-line VSX 8000 system, which is intended for use in custom-designed rooms. Polycom and others have also introduced "video error concealment" technology in recent years that can disguise some of the effects of network congestion and packet loss during a video call. Instead of losing a frame or sections of a frame, the technology intelligently "fills in" pixels with colours that match surrounding pixels. It helps reduce the jerkiness and fuzziness in video when the network is congested. Finally, high-definition room systems are coming, probably by the end of this year. Many high-end systems from companies such as Polycom and Tandberg are already HD ready. Audio Quality"It’s not only how good the video is, though," Rudnicki says. "It’s also how good is the audio. Audio is an important part of the whole experience." Audio quality has also improved. For one thing, the ITU accepted as its video conferencing standard a Polycom-developed technology called Siren14 that uses 14 KHz audio rather than the 7 KHz audio used in older systems. Polycom calls it near-CD quality, but that may be overstating the case somewhat. "It’s comparable to the difference between a fuzzy AM radio station and an FM station," Damerau says. Polycom’s StereoSurround, which the firm claims is an industry first, adds a spatial dimension to video calls so that listeners know where different speakers are in the room. This provides greater intelligibility and comprehension even when simultaneous conversations are taking place, Polycom says. Audio is captured using multiple microphones and reproduced using hi-fi stereo speakers, so a person sitting on the left side of the room is heard on the left speaker. The voice of someone walking around the room travels naturally from side to side. Tandberg has something similar in Digital Natural Audio Module (DNAM) technology and Satellite Speaker Upgrade. DNAM comes standard with the higher-end Tandberg Maestro, 6000 MXP, 7000 MXP and 8000 MXP room products. The module includes a three-way active speaker system and delivers 250 watts of power-enough to fill big rooms. Have these improvements completely eliminated the kinds of problems observed in even high-end systems a few years ago-occasionally jerky or fuzzy video and poorly synchronized audio and video? It depends to a large extent on the bandwidth of the connection, of course. According to Damerau, few users opt for 1 or 2 megabit per second (Mbps) connections anymore-partly, she says, because they can get as good an experience now with a 384 Kbps link. Damerau implies that the problems have not all disappeared, though, and that the equipment ultimately provides only as good an experience as the network allows. "You always have to deal with the network infrastructure," she says. "Until we get to the point where the networks are 100% fail proof and you always get all the bandwidth that you asked for ... in a perfect video conferencing world, that’s what it would be, but we’re not there yet." When we ask Rudnicki if the old problems still crop up sometimes in conferences using high-end room systems, she says, "They’re gone. I’ve been with Tandberg just over two years and the difference is really amazing." Later, in reference specifically to audio-video synch problems, she says, "Those types of things are pretty rare at this point." Pricing StablePrices for room systems, meanwhile, have remained fairly flat. According to Damerau, a Polycom VSX 8000 system for a high-end, custom-designed room costs from $17,000 to $25,000. That includes the video codec device, one camera, software licensing to do multipoint conferencing with up to six sites and a built-in conference bridge. It doesn’t include screens. Rudnicki estimates all-in prices for room video technology for a high-end custom-designed room at between $60,000 and $73,000 per site. Does video conferencing work? It obviously depends on your requirements. Companies like DreamWorks that demand absolutely natural communications that give the illusion of being in the same room with participants half a world away will inevitably be frustrated by the room systems sold by Polycom and Tandberg. But they clearly work well in lots of other situations-or companies wouldn’t be buying them.

Video Conferencing: Does It Work Yet?

News | 10/03/2005 4:00 am EDT

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