Podcast: Brightcom Shares Best Practices for Cross-Bridging a Telepresence System

Telepresence (News - Alert) can offer a natural environment for participants to create personal relationships and imitate face-to-face communication. As telepresence continues to increase in popularity among communication tools for the progressive business and mobile consumers, the quality of the experience continues to be a key focus.


Brightcom is one company that provides integrated telepresence and videoconferencing solutions. This company is setting the standard for immersive telepresence through the enhancement of the value of the experience as a result of integrated collaborative technology.

Cost savings continues to be a priority focus for a number of companies today and telepresence helps to drive effective communications while still maintaining the integrity of the bottom line. Video conferencing is also gaining in popularity as companies continue to expand globally while cutting back on international travel.

One of the biggest challenges in the industry is the ability to integrate different types of environments to create a single, high quality teleprescence or conferencing experience. Brightcom offers a great solution to integrate the environment holistically to enable the client to leverage current investments while enjoying the advantages of the Brightcom framework.

TMCnet recently spoke with Bob McCandless, CEO of Brightcom, and Mark Szotkowski, a communications broker and master agent with Portfolio Communications Solutions. These two industry experts addressed the top issues to consider when cross-bridging a telepresence system with an HD video conferencing system and a SD video conferencing system.

“One of the things we really pride ourselves on at Brightcom is our ability to do this exact type of cross integration,” McCandless said during the podcast. “We are a telepresence vendor, but we are also super excited about Skype and some of the new things that are happening in the industry. Cisco (News - Alert) has a lot of plans for the home market. More endpoints is better. The more folks that can participate in a cross integrated video and the HD conference, the better the experience can be.”

“You need an infrastructure like the Brightcom system that will allow you to dynamically see HD and SD, as well as webcam and all the new things that will come. The explosion of video conferencing is to come where you will see video conferencing from every end point imaginable,” McCandless said.

From a network standpoint, providers need to understand the goals of the client when it comes to conferencing. Each type of design should be specific to the customer to deliver the best experience possible.

 

According to Szotkowski, “The key here is having enough bandwidth for all of your endpoints that you have a clear signal. As networks continue to grow throughout all the major carriers in the world, bandwidth glut will be there and we will have plenty of bandwidth.

 

“The question is: how will I make sure my video has the highest priority across all of these networks? Network providers need to come together on a standard on the priority of data. If we can control the customers’ experience by having them on a single carrier network, it is a lot easier to take care of them and make sure that quality gets throughout from one point to the other.”

 

To listen to the podcast in full, visit BrightCom’s telepresence channel on TMCnet.com.