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Businesses tune into video

Computer Dealer News - August 13, 1999

The world as we know it has shrunk dramatically in the past five years. Today's businesses ignore time, calendar and borders. It has all come about because of the convergence of voice, video, computer and Internet technologies.

While most of the attention has been focused on merging the computer and television set, computer monitors have increasingly been converted to video screens. Sitting on almost every desk, these screens are increasingly serving dual roles. Strong network backbones, switches that can provide sufficient bandwidth and throughput and compression technology for streaming video economically, have sped the use of business video far beyond the Fortune 500.

Enabling this convergence has been the merging infrastructures that support data, telephony and video. All three of these forms of communications have become digitized so they can efficiently and effectively be carried over data networks. By tightly integrating voice, video and data, organizations are able to eliminate redundant equipment and costs.

With the global adoption of Internet Protocol (IP) standards, the industry has set the stage for tomorrow's communications. Large and small organizations are implementing streaming video, video on demand and interactive video for distance learning, videoconferencing, collaborative work-groups, corporate and business communications and infotainment. The results will have a profound impact on the organizational structure of the business, and undoubtedly will

determine its viability for years to come.

With the integration of telephony and data transmission infrastructure, firms are restructuring to provide for a business climate where global communications and interconnectivity dictates the structure of the organizations. Increasingly firms are becoming geographically distributed to create a global presence and to adapt to the needs of today's workforce. Streaming media has become a powerful and flexible communications technology that answers a wide range of global business needs.

There will always be a need for meetings to exchange ideas and information. But it is possible to eliminate the time and money expenditure required to travel to these meetings. By implementing a streaming media technique called multicasting, executives can disseminate key messages immediately to every employee of the organization. The video message can be easily streamed across the firm's network directly to the employee's video screen.

Using multicasting, unicasting or video on demand (VOD) techniques, organizations can make available technical and business educational information immediately or at a time that is convenient to the employee. Trainers can develop one strong multimedia presentation rather than continually repeating the same message again and again. The training information can be quickly updated and posted without having to duplicate and disseminate the new material throughout the organization.

Interactive meetings across the network and Internet are growing rapidly in popularity and use. Corporate conference rooms can be easily and economically equipped with videoconferencing capabilities and many firms are taking the capability right to the individual's workstation. Documents, images, voice and video are being used for real-time communications rather than requiring people to spend time and money to attend the meeting.

The driving force behind the deployment of this collaborative technology is information sharing. Firms are breaking down the barriers to information flow between information producers and information consumers. Rather than installing phones, ordering mail/delivery services and setting up data/filing systems, firms are: installing intranets for organizational communications; establishing an Internet Service Provider (ISP); creating a Web site; and advertising their presence to the world. By combining telephony with the multimedia-enabled desktop computers, people have access to video teleconferencing technology from the desktop; access to multimedia presentation technology for all business communications; and a medium for application sharing and collaborative content development.

The Web has also opened up a new array of opportunities for sharing information and conducting business in cyberspace. The sites most frequently visited on the Web have high-quality graphic design as a common attribute, and they all accentuate the interactive medium.

Animated videos of a company's products or an engineering concept in action; the results of Web and field research or the news of the day; interactive charting or graphing of sales data from around the globe; and interactive problem resolution with suppliers, engineers and customers - these are the "killer apps" that are driving the growing investment in network-based video technology in organizations.

There are two forms of virtual activities emerging: 1) the virtual corporation and 2) virtual research. When you consider the departmental nature of corporations, you tend to think in terms of well-delineated areas of responsibility. Interaction with various units (e.g. accounting, procurement, or publications) tends to be transactional in nature. In the old paradigm individuals complete a form, place a phone call or a conduct a quick conference to review catalogue information and take the appropriate action. In the new paradigm e-mail takes the place of the form, and a videoconference, with co-ordinated Web page viewing, takes the place of the conference. Multipoint videoconferencing, virtual white boards and shared applications provide a new level of synergy. The greatest value of the approach is that consulting talent can be easily brought in for short duration activities to help teams move past hurdles by taking advantage of special expertise.

Perhaps the single biggest challenge to widespread video implementation will be bandwidth that is intelligently delivered and managed. By implementing hardware-based MPEG compression at the encoding and decoding stages, organizations can not only make more efficient use of their available bandwidth but can also deliver higher quality, more consistent video messages to the recipients.

The virtual organization exists in the form of team members connected together through public and private networks and technology enabled by communications and collaboration applications.

It is likely that we may see many more organizations adopting a virtual component to support and enhance their operations in the near future.

The question is no longer whether they will implement these changes - but when.

Fact Check

* Interactive meetings across the Internet are growing in popularity.

* Video teleconferencing encourages collaboration.

Bill Wong is vice-president of marketing, at Sigma Designs Inc., based in Milpitas, Calif.

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