Vidyo, a company that has developed videoconferencing technology that can deliver high-quality images over the Internet and conventional IP networks, is being adopted by a Japanese telecommunications company to deliver a videoconference service to its customers.
Vidyo announced today that its platform, VidyoConferencing, which is based on the H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) compression standard, will be used by KDDI, a Japanese carrier that offers both wireless and wireline service, beginning in January. KDDI will market a video conference service to businesses and individuals to deliver high-quality video over common networks and end user devices, including HD TV monitors, desktop and laptop computers and smartphones.
Vidyo's architecture, based on SVC, has advantages over the current multipoint control unit (MCU) platform for high-definition video conferencing, such as that used by Cisco Systems' TelePresence technology, says Marty Hollander, senior VP of marketing at Vidyo. The MCU architecture requires dedicated network connectivity between locations and expensive hardware. But since Vidyo's product is software-based, it can be installed on an enterprise's network and any devices accessing the network can use it, Hollander says.
Although SVC is an industry standard that any company can use, Vidyo adds unique intellectual property to its solution that gives it a "10 to 100 times price-performance advantage," says Andrew Davis, a co-founder of Wainhouse Research. "It's a huge, huge advantage."
Vidyo's architecture is based on a video router that is not an MCU, but it provides many of the functions of an MCU, Davis explains. It takes streams in from the person sending video and distributes them to multiple recipients on different end point devices.
