Vidyo Granted Patent For Groundbreaking Video Conferencing Architecture

HACKENSACK, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vidyo Inc., the first company to deliver personal telepresence, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company a patent for its VidyoRouter architecture which delivers reliable, low latency, multipoint conferencing over any IP network including the Internet. The patent (U.S. Patent No. 7,593,032 entitled "System and Method for a Conference Server Architecture for Low Delay and Distributed Conferencing Applications") covers the key intellectual property behind Vidyo's groundbreaking video conferencing technology.

"For many years video conferencing just didn't work because the quality was inconsistent and the delays were too long for highly interactive communications," said Ofer Shapiro, CEO of Vidyo. "Telepresence remedied these problems by guaranteeing the network and eliminating the multipoint conferencing bridge, but at very high cost. This patent validates the innovation and technology behind the VidyoRouter architecture, which is based on the new H.264/SVC (Scalable Video Coding) standard, and maintains the lowest latency and most consistent quality of telepresence on the Internet and on any computer."

"When you eliminate the need for expensive networks and expensive MCUs as part of the HD multi-party video conferencing experience, then the possibilities of what can be done with video communications are endless," said Andrew W. Davis, Senior Analyst and Partner at Wainhouse Research. "Vidyo has changed the economics, the scalability and the quality of the experience. Their technology opens the door for large scale video conferencing deployments."

Vidyo was the first company to utilize H.264/SVC as the basis for a video conferencing solution. H.264/SVC is a video compression standard that enables a video stream to be broken into multiple resolutions, quality levels and bit rates. Utilizing this capability and Vidyo's intellectual property, the VidyoRouter architecture offers unprecedented error resiliency while eliminating the MCU. The VidyoRouter is the first video multipoint solution that can deliver rate matching and continuous presence capabilities without an additional video encode and decode. This unique capability allows for less than half of the end-to-end latency of MCU-based solutions.

"SVC-enabled video solutions work better in environments with variable performance, such as the Internet," said Scott Morrison, Research Vice President, Enterprise Network Services, Gartner, Inc. "As a result, it will be increasingly possible to stream video communications over Internet connections for many use cases, while retaining a high-quality experience."Although others are attempting to use the H.264/SVC standard and claiming improved quality, potential customers should exercise caution, because not all SVC products are equal in terms of quality or price. Without the VidyoRouter architecture, other SVC solutions are still dependent on using the MCU to transcode and that remains the biggest obstacle to the advancement of video conferencing. http://www.vidyo.com/whitepaper_info.html

"We've dramatically changed the business model from one that's dependent on hardware, to a software platform," said Shapiro. "The VidyoRouter reduces by several orders of magnitude the amount of processing required in the network core."

Until Vidyo introduced its revolutionary technology in 2008, unified communications companies wanting to deliver video over converged IP networks did not have the necessary means to provide high quality video conferencing over non-QOS IP networks. When Vidyo offered the first commercial video conferencing implementation based on H.264/SVC, it radically changed this scenario, offering unified communications solution providers and conferencing services providers the ability to integrate better point-to-point and multipoint video communication capabilities into their offerings.

"When we looked for a video conferencing technology that would enable us to deliver high quality and cost-effective personal telepresence, Vidyo was clearly our only choice," said Takeshi Masuda, Executive Vice President of Telecommunications & Network Systems Division, Hitachi, Ltd. "With Vidyo's technology, we were able to build a video conferencing solution that is better than any MCU-based product. We feel that this gives us a tremendous competitive advantage."