The idea of “personal telepresence” is one that's borne witness to a series of flops in the space, but also to plenty of companies that still hope that one day, getting people together will be even easier than we imagine today. To that end, Vidyo and Samsung (News - Alert) have joined together to submit a response to a recent call for proposals for building scalable coding extensions on the HEVC—High Efficiency Video Coding—standard.

A joint effort from the ITU-T and ISO MPEG groups, HEVC is out to reduce the amount of bandwidth necessary to transmit video as compared to the amount used by H.265, the current standard in video communications. Since Vidyo (News - Alert) has already brought Scalable Video Coding technology to video conferencing as far back as 2007, and further considering that Vidyo is regarded in some quarters as the first company to ever deliver personal telepresence, it makes them especially valuable in terms of providing scalability to the HEVC standard, making it ready for today's needs, and more likely to meet tomorrow's as well. With Vidyo on board and involved in the matter, HEVC will contain designs related to fully 19 of Vidyo's currently pending patent applications.

Vidyo's Chief Scientist, as well as its co-founder, Alex Eleftheriadis, said of the project, “This architecture eliminates the need for transcoding and enables ‘technology transparency’, providing an experience uninterrupted by performance flaws arising from issues like network reliability, MCU driven latency, or end-point capabilities. As a result, any new codec design intended for real-time communication will need to have scalability, and we are happy to be part of the HEVC process as we were with H.264 SVC. Vidyo is already ‘HEVC ready’ and will be software-upgradeable when the new codec is released.”

Vidyo has not only been deeply involved in the HEVC standard, it has also been pushing for standards in media transport and signaling alike, making interoperability more likely and possible in the first place thanks to a set of common standards from which developers can work.

Telepresence (News - Alert) may well be one of the best possible ways for employers to fully realize the mobile worker system. A connection that's as easy to establish as a chat session, yet provides a full view of the employee in question as if they were in the room with the employer, is about the next best thing to actually having them in the room with you.

Better yet, it also reduces the need for facilities expenses, lowering costs down to a few office spaces with Internet connections down from a few hundred or a few thousand cubicles. Why not allow employees to work from home? They pay their own power bill, their own water bill, their own Internet bill. Even better, they're not upset about doing so because they pay less on gas to drive and carry out a commute. It would seem like a win-win all the way around, and with the added transparency and accountability support that telepresence systems would provide, it only gets better.

While the time to release of these improved telepresence systems is still somewhat unclear, the better they get, the more likely that more companies will be willing to get into the cost saving measures represented by mobile workers. Vidyo, meanwhile, will be right at the tip of that particular spear.

To hear more about the ways enterprises can benefit from multipoint video conferencing and the role virtualization plays, check out the archived version of this Vidyo Webinar.

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