The Ultimate Guide Of Video Conferencing Solutions 2019

What is Video Conferencing ?

A video conference is a live real time, communication session between Two or a lot of users residing in separate locations. This technology allows business conferences, routine conferences, business deals, and even interviews between totally different offices/branches located at far locations. Its use cases are endless because it saves a lot of your time, cost and hassle associated with business travel.  Lately, several organizations have also implemented Video Conferencing to such an extent that it's become their preferred mode of communication over an instantaneous telephonic call or audio conferencing.

Benefits of Video Conferencing 

• Reduce time to market by connecting stakeholders instantly for more productive discussions
• Engage more productively with the remote workers by seeing them more frequently
• Increase in productivity and efficiency of employees
• Communicating face-to-face sends an indirect message before you say a word. By watching emotions,hand/body gestures and body language people tends to connect more deeply and it is also a very effective way to emphasize on key messages
• Lower travel costs (No need for physical presence
• Host informative/educative sessions and provide employees training through materials visually and more quickly
• Opens a new era of smart classroom concept for the new generation and also provides education to remote areas.

Video Conferencing vs Video Collaboration

Nowadays these Two terms are usually overlapped but once we talk about Video collaboration, it's one step ahead of Video Conferencing. whereas video conferencing is all about enabling  video and audio communication between two or multi-parties, video collaboration is video call along with sharing of documents, presentation materials, whiteboards and similar group presentation visual aids.

 Basic Components of Video Conferencing  Infrastructure

Display: 

Choosing the right display for your video conferencing system is the first step towards building an ultimate VC experience. It all depends upon your requirement, size of your conference room, usage frequency, surround lighting and your budget

Speaker:

·       Integrated speaker of TV

·       Intergrated speaker of customized VC solution

·       Additonal audio speaker as per the room size

Camera: 

Generally OEMs provide their own camera which can have different specs like:

·       HD Camera Pan, tilt and zoom camera for up to 4k UHD capture (Commonly known as PTZ cameras)

·       20x/12x/4x zoom options

·       Wide viewing angle: 65-degree view, 85-degrees view etc

·       Facial-tracking to accurately frame all room participants(aka auto-framing or smart-framing) or focus on the person speaking

Mic: 

Here also OEMs provide their own Mic with different specs like 360-degree coverage, 22 kHz of high-fidelity audio. There are two types of mic available:

·       Table Top(Unidirectional)

·       Ceiling Mic

Processor (Codec):

A processor/codec is a device or algorithm for encoding or decoding a signal with the help of pre-defined protocols.

Different Types of Video Conferencing Solutions (Based on capability)

1.     Point-to-Point Video Conferencing: Designed for two parties in a one-on-one situation, both parties can talk from different locations.

2.     Multi-Point Video Conferencing: Up to 8-25 people(number depending upon OEM) can join meeting at the same time.

3.     Multipoint Control Unit (MCU): For more than 8-25 parties, MCU is required. It consists of a video-networking bridge.

4.     Desktop/Mobility Solutions: Desktop/Mobility solutions provide full video conferencing capabilities on desktop, tablets & smartphones.

5.     Cloud-Based Solutions

·        Up to 100 attendees per meeting

·        Internal and External, no additional hardware

·        Any Device: room system, tablet, mobile, PC, MAC

·        Stream out live to Facebook & Workplace

·        Easily Scalable

·        Join meetings from Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize and other H.323 and SIP-based room systems.