Friday, October 20, 2006

Videoconferencing - we'll all be at it soon

Peter Thomson, Director of the Future Work Forum at Henley Management College which he founded in 1992, has a new blog called Future for Work which is worth keeping an eye on.

His latest post looks at videoconferencing and suggests that we'll all be using video calls/meeting by 2011. He also says:

"It is often assumed that you have to invest in thousands of pounds of kit in order to use videoconferencing and then have dedicated ISDN lines. However, today I've seen a demonstration of a video meeting using broadband/internet connections with four people happily participating. This was based on Microsoft's Livemeeting so it had whiteboarding and application sharing and it was combined with Arel anywhere video software. The clever thing about this setup was that the user just needs a PC, webcam and to download two small pieces of software. They can then log in to the servers (one button operation from Outlook) and use the meeting room. As with a physical meeting room it has to be booked and costs £50 per hour which is comparable to the cost of renting meeting space for a face to face meeting. Or for £6k per year you can have your own meeting room available whenever you wish."

No comments:

Post a Comment