{"id":836,"date":"2010-10-07T20:28:44","date_gmt":"2010-10-07T20:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=836"},"modified":"2010-10-07T20:28:44","modified_gmt":"2010-10-07T20:28:44","slug":"video-phones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/10\/07\/video-phones\/","title":{"rendered":"Video phones!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jetsons<\/a><\/p>\n

Well not quite… but we’re getting there. Video conferencing has been common in business for years – admittedly with varying levels of success – but at home other than computer based calling with things like Skype it’s never really been an option.<\/p>\n

It looks like that’s starting to change. Cisco<\/a>, one of the big players in the business video conferencing game, has just announced a product call Umi<\/a>, pronounced you-me apparently! It’s a basically a high quality HD camera and box-of-tricks that you plug into your television to turn it into a video conferencing unit. The idea being that you;ll be able to both talk to and see friends and family around the world. Well providing they have either an Umi of their own or a computer with Google Video chat. \u00a0It’s not hard to see Cisco linking with a connected version of their Flip camera<\/a> in future either.<\/p>\n

Cisco aren’t the only ones either, Microsoft’s new Kinect<\/a> add-on for the XBox will provide much the same capabilies, this time linked with XBox Live and MSN Messenger. Google are also getting in on the game through their Google TV<\/a> platform. Whilst details are scarce it’s looking likely that people like Logitech<\/a> and Sony will be offering video calling through their Google TV appliances.<\/p>\n

Will it take off? Who knows. Skype is a pretty popular way for people to stay in touch, so having a better way of doing that video calling is probably an attractive proposition for a lot of people. \u00a0That said, the bandwidth requirements<\/a> for Umi (the only ones published so far) are pretty hefty. \u00a0Full 1080p HD video will need 3.5Mb\/sec upstream<\/em> capacity. \u00a0I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but here in the UK where ADSL is the most common form of home connectivity upstream bandwidth is typically below 1Mb\/sec.<\/p>\n

The other key\u00a0consideration\u00a0is of course is interoperability, you’re not going to buy into home video conferencing unless you can be sure you can talk to your buddies. If an Umi user can’t call a Google TV user or an XBox user the value is limited. Fortunately there are some well established standards for the technical aspects of setting up a call and transferring video, but how compliant these various solutions will be is a little unknown. Seeing as I have a Kinect on pre-order I’m hoping that MS will extend it’s reach out to Skype, Google etc. Time will tell I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Video calls have been the future since the 50’s, Cisco Umi, Google TV and XBox Kinect bring this future of home video conferencing closer than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool-stuff","category-tech","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}