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Comparing VSee with legacy video conferencing

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We are often asked how VSee compares to room-based conferencing systems and when each type of system is appropriate.  A recent thread on the VSee Forum covers this topic in detail and is worth reposting here:

by mbrown1 on Thu Jul 30, 2009 1:16 pm

Rich,

Have you done a comparison with true Video Conference products over IP, such as; LifeSize, iVisit, Vidyo, Tandberg (Movi2/VCS), Polycom (CMA), etc . . . that require a dedicated infrastructure? If so, what have you learned? If not, why not – are these too costly for evaluation?

by Rich on Thu Jul 30, 2009 2:34 pm

I have evaluated many hardware-based VC solutions. LifeSize room (pretty darn good – expensive infra, around 6 Mbs); iVisit runs on desktops and is poor (although written by one of my VC heroes, Tim Dorcey who wrote CU-SeeMe at Cornell Univ.); Vidyo I’ve used extensively and like it very much – but it is pricey (although much cheaper than traditional HD gear) and also needs

1.5-4 Mbs for 6-way.

I got to see a beta of Polycom, CMA a year or so ago while at NJEdge; nice – but like, Tandberg’s Movi II; needs expensive gear. Additional costs are for the gateway to make them work with premise h.323 equipment as they are both SIP based.

My take on hardware-endpoint versus PC-based software endpoints are that they’re both nice for various usage scenarios. I travel a lot and wouldn’t want to lug a Tandberg, 990 MXP with me – however, I’m never without my laptop, Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks and Duet PCS USB speakphone. But I think the biggest determinant is whether you need to connect with those on legacy equipment. I work in the educational space where there is a preponderance of Polycom H.323 equipment. For that, I use Mirial Softphone; even while in the office. The other reality is that even lower-end, used hardware endpoints like Tandberg’s 990 MXP are anywhere from $4,000 or so. Mirial is about $140 and a small monthly fee for updates and whatnot. (BTW, I’ve tried software H.323 clients based on OpenH323 – they’re pretty low-quality.) The upside to hardware-based H.323/SIP endpoints is they have dedicated DSPs for optimal performance.

The advantage I find with VSee over other PC-based VC systems like Vidyo, Mirial, etc. is that multi-participant sessions usually tax your machine’s system resources and available commodity bandwidth. VSee is optimized to use the least amount of bandwidth and PC resources while maintaining those criteria most important for the best end-user experience which is lip-sync, smooth-motion, fair edge-sharpness and spatial-detail at 320×240 and very low bandwidth requirements. What I’ve found is that the factor which most affects the quality of video is bandwidth. There will always be issues with network latency, jitter and various sorts of packet collisions which have the accumulative effect of mucking up real time video/audio. The best way to deal with that is to increase bandwidth (not an option over the commodity internet) or decrease the reliance on bandwidth. This is where VSee shines. SightSpeed has a pretty low bandwidth requirement too and does a good job at maintaining lip-sync and smooth-motion; but at the expense of video quality. I find it distracting to look at fuzzy video for extended periods.

For my workgroups/family/friends, I use VSee. I’ve long campaigned to get those folks off disparate “toy” video phone apps like: Skype, SightSpeed, ooVoo, VZOchat, AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo IM, Logitech Vid, etc. and to get them to use VSee. I’ve had pretty good luck actually – and will have an easier job at it once VSee adds a few more features like IM-only and Voice-only URIs to the existing, sole vsee: URI to initiate a session.

One area where VSee could stand some improvement is in its audio CODEC. They use SpeeX for the high-quality setting and DSP Groups, TrueSpeech for standard (narrow-band) audio. CELT is looking really good and should soon be robust enough to provide 70Hz-15KHz audio optimized for voice/speech with very low delay.

So….long story short. Hardware-based endpoints are great. Only if you need to connect to legacy H.323/SIP users and you’re in a video-conference room.

PC-based software H.323/SIP endpoints are cheaper – but again, only useful if you need to connect to legacy H.323/SIP users.

If you have an ad-hoc group, especially when comprised with mobile folks who often rely on hotel bandwidth/aircards, Starbucks WiFi, etc. – VSee is awesome and allows real multi-participant collaboration.

Sorry I tend to ramble a bit – did that answer your questions?

by mbrown1 on Thu Jul 30, 2009 4:00 pm

Yes Rich, thank you so much for the information. We are in the process of looking at various VC products with priorities set on; Security issues (ability to control specific functions for each user, Single Signon authentication, logging calls, scan between Firewalls, etc . . . ), automated processes that enable IP projectors to be unmanned, application / desktop sharing, lip-sync scenarios while going through a rather lengthy delayed communication process (perhaps up to 6 seconds) and cost.

by Rich on Thu Jul 30, 2009 5:34 pm

Wow. You just ran through the feature set of VSee!

1.) Security = FIPS 140-2 (actually NIST FIPS 140-2 just dictates the metric and testing protocol for security – but VSee uses 256-bit Rijndael “AES”. That the NSA has deemed sufficient to protect classified information up to the TOP SECRET level.)

2.) VSee Directory Service – allows control of which users have access to which other users and what they can do

3.) Single Sign-On (well I know the VSee Directory Service can be added to your LDAP or Active Directory IDM stack – unless you are using Active Directory you’ll probably have to use an SSO authentication shim like CAS on top of the Identity Manager)

4.) Usage logs: I believe this is also a feature of VSee Directory Service

5.) Cross FW (by use of the VSee Relay Service)

6.) Remote, unmanned usage: the VSee SDK’s Client Automation will probably fit the bill here

7.) Latency Coping – GATR Technologies has partnered with VSee Labs; probably due to VSee’s dynamic lip-sync buffering for their satellite telemetry infrastructure (you wanna talk latency….

8.) Cost – the real clincher. I’ve spoken to Milton in the past about pricing. They’re dirt cheap when you consider most of these functions (if even available in other platforms) require hanging kludges onto existing H.323 infrastructure. An example is adding real security to H.323: KG-194 and KIV family of products are super expensive and very fidgety – check out Adtran or Centicom to get an idea of pricing – not to speak of the extra layer of bits required to send it all. Now add H.460.17/.18/.19 servers to H.323 to help in firewall and NAT traversal. Now add IM, Document, video, application sharing, PSTN call out, etc. and you’re talking huge expense and lots of maintenance and service contracts that seriously bring your yearly costs to crazy levels. What I like about VSee is that not only have all these features been designed to work together from the ground up, but are provided under very affordable pricing.

Sorry – I guess I’m sounding like a brochure; but I have spent a lot of time and effort to both refine my selection criteria and test the available solutions. I’ll always continue to but I also always find myself coming back to VSee.

You might also be interested to read our article here: VSee – Free Alternative to Vidyo Telepresence Business Video Conference – Comparison

Freedom Rings–You Can’t Run From It Anymore

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Here is a link is to a video I made of a Primerica agent who swears by Ring (powered by VSee).  This was at the Primerica show a few weeks ago.  If you fast forward to about 6:00 min, he does 1:45 min story on how he showed an elderly, reluctant agent how to use VSee (transcript below).  He gets a call later that same day from him saying he closed a deal using it!  The first half of the video is his experience, but the audio is weak, so I’ve highlighted some of the things he talks about:

using Ring even with people who don’t have a camera or a speaker–”just have him put you on speaker phone, tell him to watch his screen, show him a quick quote, here are the questions,  get your mouse ready, sign the application, done in 15 minutes”

keeping appointments that otherwise would have been canceled due to weather–”In Virginia when it snows, the whole city shuts down.  It takes them days to shovel the roads.  Half the appointments are canceled.  It’s a great way to make some sales because then I know they’re at home”

time and money savings from not having to drive to an appointment–”drive time alone is an hour, then I spend 45 minutes at their hoem”

customers enjoy and are impressed with the technology-”it’s a new generation, they’re all under 35 so it’s a given with them. They all Skype and gTalk anyways.

reduce paperwork–”I have guys who groan when they see the stack of paperwork I pull out, especially transferring back and forth.  With this, one time through…click,click,click, and they’re done” Continue reading →

VSee Team Members Making a Difference

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On March 30th, a group of students in Burbank, CA, talked with students from several schools in the Darfuri refugee camp Goz Amer in eastern Chad.

This was made possible by two of our very own, Yuen-Lin Tan and Eric Angel, who spend their free time volunteering for i-ACT (Interactive Activism).

Yuen-Lin Tan joined the i-ACT team in 2005, answering founder Gabriel Stauring’s call for assistance with the technological aspects of the first i-ACT mission to Chad. Since then, Yuen-Lin has made two trips to Chad, spending time in person with the refugees from Darfur, and deepening his commitment to helping them.  In fact, Yuen-Lin developed the system that made Wednesday’s event possible.  He is also responsible for bringing VSee to i-ACT and UNHCR for the annual World Refugee Day webcasts.

In June of 2009 Eric Angel traveled as a member of the i-ACT team to the refugee camps in Chad. He ran the on-site technical operations for several live video conferences from within the camps. This included a UNHCR World Refugee Day event and a five hour long live video feed that was viewed by people from around the world on a UNHCR website as it was happening.

It’s not so long ago that the students in the US would never have been able to put a face on events happening overseas.  This may or may not be part of the isolation that is welling up in this country despite the fact that information and communication are now global and nearly instantaneous.  However, thanks to technologies such as VSee and the efforts of people like Eric and Yuen-Lin and everyone else at i-ACT, the next generation can now see and talk to kids like themselves but that are suffering from political, ethnic or religious persecution and wars.  These students will hopefully value these interactions, and continue to be personally involved when they become the next generation of business, civic, and world leaders.

Thank you Eric, and Burbank High School, and i-ACT, and the students of Camp Goz Amer, for helping ensure we raise not just citizens of the US, but citizens of the world as well.

If you’d like to support i-ACT and help connect refugee camps with the greater world, please go to http://www.iactivism.org/support/ and make a donation.

Cisco WebEx: “Little to no Work-Life Balance”

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Wow.  I would like to go on record right now as stating that at VSee, any work-life imbalance is due purely to our fanaticism and not slave-driving!  :)

That image is taken from glassdoor.com, a site for job hunters and recruiters, which also posts employee reviews so the candidates can research whether they’d like to apply to a company or not.

I don’t know if it’s because we’re smaller or, uh…hmm.  Never mind.  I’m not at all sure why we’re able to sustain a good work-life balance here and they aren’t.

Roughly half of our company works remotely.  With only a couple exceptions, those remaining are hybrid workers: Sometimes they come into the office; sometimes they work from home.  Those of us with two-income families often trade part of our work day for part of our evening to pick kids up from daycare/school/soccer.  In the case of one family where both parents work at VSee, they usually work from home and have their child in their lap while talking with other VSee employees.  Add the previously mentioned dose of fanaticism and most of us do some work late at night as well–by choice!

Not to rub it in for the “Territory Account Manager”, but our lovely east coast employees got to happily work from home while you were forced to go to the office in the snow.  And a couple of them lease office space for those times they wish to have that environment!

I must also question TAM’s assertion  of “Best in breed product.”  I honestly believe VSee is far better equipped for doing business “Any where.  Any time.”  (I’ll admit, we’re still working on “Any device.”)  Multiple people can share multiple documents from multiple locations ALL AT THE SAME TIME…something you just can’t do with WebEx.  And you can be talking with “Joe”, decide the two of you need to also talk to “Amy”, and call her in without sending an email invite.  You really don’t know how important those two capabilities are for maintaining a more natural workflow until you’ve used them.  (Shameless plug time:  Go try it out! then watch the demo video on the homepage.)

Follow us on Twitter (@VSee) and Like us on Facebook to hear about the latest from VSee! By the way, we are hiring too.

Skype and Facebook

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It could happen.

There are rumors (according to Bloomberg) that the two have been chatting about it.  Skype users can already call and SMS Facebook friends, making video the next logical next step.

Personally, this feels like a natural extension of Skype’s current incarnation as a consumer video calling tool.  I assume it would take a lot less overhauling than their stated plans to work with Citrix’s GoToMeeting to make a complete collaboration suite.  Even if I’m wrong about that, I feel the audience fit is better.

Thoughts?