Businesses and Consumers Seeing Eye-to-Eye

One of the topics we're covering in this month's issue is video-enabled unified communications. What's surprising is not that video is popping up in applications everywhere, but that it took so long for it to do so. Some of the reasons have to do with bandwidth (the U.S. is "fair to middling" in terms of broadband adoption) and some with applications, Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE) and all that.

Until recently most high-quality video was infotainment, either broadcast or delivered via a cable infrastructure to your home TV. For example, as we went to press, some consumer-based video news came from Sunnyvale, California: Harmonic Inc. (www.harmonicinc.com) would showcase a whole host of advanced digital video and HFC broadband access solutions at ANGA Cable in Cologne, Germany. Harmonic's solutions are capable of delivering live or on-demand video to any device, including TVs, PCs and mobile phones.

Although we associate sophisticated infotainment video with home IPTV over cable installations subject to standard such as Data-Over-Cable-Service-Interface-Specification Modular Cable Modem Termination System (and supported by such things as Harmonic's SUPRALink 1550 nanometer DWDM transmission system to increase fiber reach in high-bandwidth
HFC transport networks), PCs and other devices are also benefitting from such advanced video technology. Indeed, just as video-enabled business processes can appear on any device at any time, anywhere, so too can infotainment now appear on those very same devices. For example, Harmonic's Direct-2-Edge (D2E) cable IPTV system optimizes delivery of video to IPTV set-top boxes, PCs, or other IP devices, and Harmonic's ProStream 4000 multi-screen Transcoder, with its all-IP architecture, can perform real-time transcoding of 16 simultaneous channels of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC content for applications such as Internet TV, 3G/4G mobile TV and broadcast mobile TV services.

Until now we've been warned by industry pundits that things such as video-enabled UC will be too distracting and will seize time from our more leisurely pursuits. In fact, it's quite probable that the opposite situation will also come true - advanced video and multimedia infotainment will be capable of appearing on any device (even mobiles) and thus distract us from our jobs. Imagine walking down the street with an advanced 4G mobile phone, having a mental tug-of-war over whether to dictate a reply to a videomail forwarded to you from your IP PBX, or else catching a 3-minute "mobisode" of an American Idol performance. Presumably, once in the office, enterprises and other organizations will attempt to put policies in place restricting use of the network solely in terms of business applications and services - good luck with that.

It wouldn't surprise Yours Truly if our current on-the-go yet collaborative business lifestyle, already fragmented by multiple forms of media, PDAs and other mobile devices, ultimately reaches a completely atomized, positively schizoid, buzzing confusion with the addition of infotainment to the mix, arriving over exactly the same channels and devices as the most staid memo or calendar reminder.

After a few years of such torrent of choices and interruptions afforded by such personal "god-boxes", we'll all be longing for the simple days when a phone was just a phone, a TV was a TV, and PCs could only connect to bulletin
board systems and CompuServe.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC's IP Communications Group.