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Whiz-bang demos of stuff like this have been seen for a while at the extreme ends of the market. At the high end, top-quality cameras and codecs have been leveraged for distance learning and other cost-saving applications, such as video arraignments. (I guess some judges don't enjoy frequenting criminal venues, and it's too expensive to transport the accused.) This makes abundant sense, and while the equipment is expensive, the payback is obvious.

At the low end, we've all seen or used the tiny cameras that perch on top of monitors. The quality is relatively poor, and with most applications, the resulting video is often jerky and out of sync with the audio. But there seems to be a market for this stuff, nonetheless.

There is a middle ground--and the target market is you and your enterprise. My visitors' demo system included a hardware codec that could perform with a couple of different compression standards and result in quality as high as MPEG1. The hardware ships with a software component that, when loaded on workstations around the network, acts as a tuner for network video broadcasts, whether live, or stored and streamed.

The system costs about $20,000 and runs up to 20 streams. Its key appeal is supposed to be its ease of use. Frankly, I wonder where the applications might be.

Seen My Face Lately? Even the most arrogant CEO isn't going to get much satisfaction out of having his mug broadcast across the corporate network once or twice a year. And using such a system for general announcements or other more common correspondence doesn't seem likely.

But it really isn't the video devices that I find so uninteresting--it's the whole notion of needing or wanting easily accessible video on the corporate network. Video doesn't increase the immediacy of communication, nor does it necessarily improve the experience. I've participated in corporate teleconferences and simply can't see how they would be enhanced by visions of the CEO on my monitor. Sure, it would be nice to view someone's presentation materials from afar, but that's a completely different situation.

Ah, But There's Training The market for this technology is in small-scale interactive training sessions. The potential there is real. And the potential savings for your company is very real. But while the interactive training market is by no means insignificant, the technology cannot yet be realized across most WANs, where bandwidth is still too precious. So I don't think there is a lot of application for the technology now. Still, I see something on the horizon.

My guess is that you will be asked many questions about this sort of thing in the not-so-distant future. And while your network probably can't handle video right now, you may have to figure out how to make it happen, particularly for training, over the next couple of years. In that time, you'll have to provision enough wide-area bandwidth to handle the traffic. And videoconferencing vendors will have to convince us all that we can relinquish the corporate culture of the face-to-face meeting, even for training, and give this technology a shot.

So like it or not, get ready for some video, at least in small amounts. Who knows? Maybe we should all sell our airline stocks and buy into low-bandwidth video. But while not seeing the inside of an airport on a regular basis has its appeal, I doubt that most corporate meetings will be displaced by video technology any time soon. There's just something about being in the same room that is important to the psyche. At the very least, you can hide from a camera, but you can't hide in a conference room.

Send your comments on this column to Art Wittmann at awittmann@nwc.com.