Here are my takeaways from Spring VON.x
Spring time for personal video
Quite a few proof points that personal video will blossom. Jeff’s social network panel was broadcasted live by Robert Scoble from his N95, check the blog or video show.
Jonathan Christensen, is Skype's GM for audio and video, says 30% of their calls include video. He defines Skype users as a tightly clustered community, not an open social network like Facebook where the signal to noise ration is too high, you get too much and you don’t know all of your friends. Skype uses On2´s TrueMotion VP7 video codec that offers profiles including Simple (for low datarates on inexpensive processors) and Advanced (for datarates under 200 Kbps).
Brad Hunstable, co-founder Ustream.tv has 250’000 registered users of their interactive micro broadcasting. There is no time restriction on length of streaming sessions. Brad says it’s a trillion channel world now and he was born in a 3 channel world! The generation of teens is thinking this is as simple as SMS and there will be mass market soon. .Kyte TV going after celebrity models will get there drag the rest of the video players in.
Loic Le Meur, CEO Seesmic says that video conversation will be huge and asynchronous. Seesmic adds video to online communication such as IM, SMS, email, video. Users record on the website, upload or link to a video posted on a SNS and broadcast via Twitter. Seesmic API allows plugins / widgets: Wordpress, Netvibes, Firefox, Jabber, Shozu mobile clients. He says the community has requested 100’000 features request. Loic.tv, includes a video show on the company.
Ramu Sunkara, CEO Qick.com provides handset software to stream live videos from Nokia S60 to the Web. Qik is integrated with Twitter, seesmic, mogulus, blogger, mobuzz.tv, Justin.tv, YouTube and currently in alfa test. Ramu says it’s a new era form of communication that is happening and 1 billion people take this for granted. Video quality goes up and up and up, andyou should expect new features, just as ICQ or Apple II came out of nowhere 30 years ago. VON.x was streamed live on Qik.
Matt Gore , Vice President of Marketing, Paltalk presented in the online video and social media panel. They manage the long tail of video-enabled chat rooms, inter-operates with ICQ and AIM, adding live video calls. Typically there are 500 simultaneous users / rooms with the top reaching 2500 users. in categories such as music romance sport. They report 4 million active users , 1.1 million log-ins/day and 15% of users turning on theirweb-cams. They offer a freemium (free+premium) business model.
Kathryn Jones, Produce/co-founder, Synchronis.tv also presented in the online video and social media panel. In 2007, she produced “35” a 10 episodes drama streamed live on Ustream.tv from 3 cameras and earlier “Question of the Week 30 episodes podcast seen by 500'000 viewers . She talked about online video + social media : the community is there to sustain the show : I know the people that watch the same show as I do . She says that the idea that video has to follow up Hollywood rules will disappear. YouTube has been a backslash to Hollywood where every actor needed 5 plastic surgeries. “ I used used to put make-up before turning the web cam, I don’t do it anymore” .
Green light for video conferencing
I presented video collaboration attempting to cover integration issues from handsets, laptops, telepresence and beyond. Telephony published a cover page article on telepresence. Telephony lists vendors of 500 rooms worldwide and comments on the contribution to make corporations greener by reducing carbon-emissions, even if by a negligible factor.
On the panel with me was Joan Vandermate of Polycom and we agreed that we should walk the talk and in a next trade show install some of these telepresence rooms in exhibition booths rather than have employees, although these are not usually those flying the corporate jet. Her presentation was focused on the interoperability with unified communication server and Polycom had just announced integration with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server . We all agreed that fragmentation of standards for integrating directory and communication services would inhibit the pervasive use of video.
HP’s telepresence started in 2005 when DreamWorks Animation tried to links teams of animators in northern and southern California, then in Bristol. You obviously needed a “Dream” system to convince visualization professionals and the engineering constraints were quality and experience, not cost. When I first sat in one of the prototype rooms, even having worked around video for 15 years, I was amazed at the feeling you get from a 50 inch screen with home cinema quality and dedicated OC-3 (MPEG 2 1280x720 at 30 fps and CD-audio). While I was presenting HP was announcing Halo’s new 2/4-seater model designed to operate with one of the 150 or so existing Halo studios, at 25% of the original price. The beauty for me is to know that this is all using a video software pipeline running on a commodity server (HP DL380), the same one our team had used for entry-level videoconferencing on mobile phones or PCs. So in less than 2 years we have convergence of video conferencing technology from the low-end to the top. But of course my talks expanded on the convergence issues (even with software implementations), from signaling across protocols, SIP/IMS, H.323, H.320, H.324M and the challenge of trans-coding from MPEG2, H.263, H.264 etc…
Ofer Shapiro, from Vidyo gave a good overview of H.264 scalable video coding as a substitute for trans-coding gateways and even network-based multi-conferencing units. It is clearly the right technology direction asend-points are getting enough processing power, ultimately the network will only route the video stream on QoS networks and the end-points will perform the video adaptation. But that may take some time before we have a cross-industry agreed profile.
Fall of network and VoIP infrastructure
It’s more Fall than Spring for developers and providers of network-centric voice services. It’s more Fall than Spring for developers and providers of network-centric voice services. One sign was that the biggest exhibits at VON were edge services developers on Open Source such as Asterix and OpenSER . Another illustration was the discussions in the Telco 1-2-3 panel.
Martine Lapierre, VP at Alcatel-Lucent summarized this: Growth opportunities are no more telecom-centric, since the on-line and content players will provide network access freely. The stock market drives this further : audiences valuations exceed networks, therefore intangible services are eating the tangible businesses. For telecom operators, they need to move to businesses adjacent to telecoms. Questioned about mobile data opportunities she says : data at 20$/month is not sustainable when WIMAX will be offered free. There will remain a market for low cost transport at low margins : even with a very high demand, volume multiplied by zero equals zeros. The same is true for the equipment manufacturers that will scale-down with network simplification from 100 elements to 5.
Among the adjacent business opportunities, she listed : home networking, industry and public enterprises, advertising and commerce. If you own the home you own the customer, she says. This means content sharing, home management, and multi-screen services. In terms of equipment they focus on broadband gateways and femtocells but also content delivery networks for caching content. For enterprise service development she mentions exposing network features using web APIs such as BT 21CN. For advertising and commerce advertisement insertion capabilities in triple play messaging and video. And she mentioned mobile terminal m-payment 
My colleague Gary Iosbaker, HP OpenCall, CTO Americas, was also on the panel.
He is more positive and states that change can mean opportunities such as : personalized rich content, instant communications and FMC services adapted not transplanted from the internet to mobile. He sees two barriers to creativity : one is the focus on network access rather than services, the other one is the risk aversion, carrier having been focused instead on 99.999% QoS and pre-defined ROIs. We have to lower the cost of experimentation, allow new service features and make it acceptable to fail. His view is that the killer app is speed and innovation. And as a developer he stresses the need to expose the information model and APIs of the underlying infrastructure. Where is the data ? I need to access to enablers and APIs I need a programming model. There is value in a global approach such as IMS, but it has barely moved forward it takes forever to progress anything thru standards. We need to allow 100s to write widgets and even service creation environments can be a hindrance because we cannot foresee all the requirements .
Another answer to innovation came from the social network panelist who admired :
Facebook : for the strength of vision to make sure experience is safe for users to open their information to others .
Mark Canter of Broadband Mechanics for articulating the need for distributed social end-to-end and for providing their social web software
