Tag Archives: video conference

Intermountain Healthcare using VSee for Neonatal ICU (NICU)

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At the recent American Telemedicine Association (ATA) conference in Austin, TX, Intermountain Healthcare gave an exciting demo of their innovative use of VSee for neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Key to their setup was VSee’s ability to send multiple camera video streams at the same time.  Legacy systems such as Vidyo, Polycom, and Cisco can only send 1 camera feed at a time.

Dr. Stephen Minton, Intermountain neonatologist and director of newborn services, gave a talk at ATA and showcased several powerful medical work flows for VSee NICU that he helped design.  Intermountain’s 60-bed NICU renovation powered by VSee will be in operation in 3-4 months.

Dr. Minton Neonatal telemedicine demo

Dr. Minton, the remote specialist

VSee telehealth Neonatal ICU

3 HD camera views of the isolette

VSee telehealth NICU demo

Doctor being directed in the resuscitation procedure

Three HD webcams are mounted on the isolette (for medical procedures) or warmer (holding crib) to show the baby from different angles and one webcam is aimed at the nurse/doctor for communicating with the remote neonatologist. The webcams are connected to a Mac mini and the entire setup is positioned such as to not take up space from working doctors and nurses.

isolette neonatal telehealth demo

Isolette setup using 3 Logitech 920 webcams, a Mac mini, & VSee

For high-risk babies that need specialist care, such as a resuscitation procedure, it’s no longer necessary to do a costly, time-consuming transfer from a local hospital to the hospital where the neonatologist is located.  Instead, a neonatologist like Dr. Minton can easily extend his care to another hospital via VSee in a matter of seconds. Through live video streams coming from the different webcams, a seasoned specialist can direct a less experienced doctor in the procedure.

For anxious parents, the VSee telemedicine NICU can now offer them around the clock access to their infants. Parents often feel like they don’t have enough time to see their little ones during their NICU visits. Using VSee, parents and families can call in anytime to see their babies.  They can even hold the iPad in their arms as though they are holding their babies and sleep with them in bed.

Finally, for busy doctors, These NICU beds can be set to auto-receive calls securely only from them so they can check in on a little patient at any time.

Learn more about VSee simple telehealth here.

Vidyo Funding Now At $116M

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Vidyo video conference reviewVidyo video conference topped VentureWire’s startup announcements with the $17.1 million it just secured in a fifth round of funding. That brings Vidyo’s total funding up to a whopping $116 million. Leading the pack this time is Triangle Peak Partners.  In the previous round Vidyo raised $22 millon lead by QuestMark. Other previous investors include Juniper Networks, Menlo Ventures, Rho Capital Partners, Star Ventures, Saint and Four Rivers Group.

At this point it looks like Vidyo is going to be a permanent thorn in the side for Polycom as Vidyo continues to gain popularity in the videoconf market. Last year Vidyo reported 68% billings growth and recently it has seen a jump in its health care and education purchases. A software-based product, Vidyo has been able to offer significantly cheaper video conference than traditional Polycom or Cisco system while maintaining video quality.

At VSee we’ve been going head-to-head with Vidyo on almost every telehealth deal, and our contribution to the video conference market is that we’ve forced Vidyo to lower its price by almost 50% in the last few months. (Vidyo normally quotes its API at $250-400K and has now lowered this quote by 50%.)

Despite Vidyo advantages over Polycom, any Vidyo deployment still requires Vidyo Portal, Vidyo Router, and complex server infrastructure to scale any successful deployment – with a large scale deployment usually costing more than $1 million.  VSee is peer-to-peer and eliminates these server requirements, while still delivering great video. This has allowed VSee to wage a price war with Vidyo.  You can see how VSee compares with Vidyo in raw video performance here: http://vsee.com/vidyo

So are you ready to eliminate your video infrastructure nightmares and enjoy a higher quality service with VSee?  Come talk to us about our telehealth services or ask us how we can save you the $1M you’d spend with Vidyo :)

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Milton Speaking At IBM Connect 2013 – The Science & Myths of Video Conference + Screen Share.

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Catch VSee’s CEO Milton speaking on “The Science and Myths of Video Conference + Screen Sharing” at this year’s IBM Connect 2013 conference!

With Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts making video conference a common experience, we want to know how to make the most of these tools. Milton will be debunking popular myths such as “70% of all communication is visual” and discussing recent psychology findings on the value of video. He will explain why audio-only is a surprisingly effective medium for conveying visual information (why do we gesture on the telephone?) and when is it critical to have video.  He will also examine tasks where video is essential and quantify the value of video and screen share on sales, support, building trust and getting things done.

Milton will be speaking on the SpeedGeek circuit

when: Monday, January 28, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

where: Dolphin Atlantic Hall

(SpeedGeeking is a condensed, immersive and rowdy approach to hearing from some of the best and brightest and a wildly popular approach to learning about the tips, techniques and (sometimes crazy) ideas that they have been working on. Similar to speed dating, participants will migrate as a group around the room from one 5-minute demo station to the next, while stopwatches, buzzers, and a loud-mouthed emcee keeps things fast-paced and on track!)

IBM Lotusphere Connect 2013

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Why Google Hangouts Dropped Vidyo For WebRTC

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In my article on VSee vs. Google+ Hangouts, I mentioned that Google had used Vidyo’s technology at one point to power their real-time video products (such as Hangouts and GoogleTalk video chat).  However, they eventually dropped Vidyo because in the end, Vidyo is just too complicated and requires too much infrastructure.  Meanwhile, the direction Google is heading is a browser-based experience with WebRTC.  In fact, this is the trend for video conferencing in general.  Here’s my quick summary of where video conferencing is going.

Three Generations of Video Conferencing Architecture

First generation: products such as Polycom and Tandberg (+) These products made video quality good enough for high quality conversations for the first time in history at a reasonable price (for IT departments).  Before Polycom and Tandberg, your choices were expensive hardware such as PictureTel ($100K to $200K) or software such as CUseeMe.  Software-based video quality was sufficiently poor that it was mainly a novelty and didn’t have market adoption.  Polycom and Tandberg offered hardware in the $10K to 30K range, a cost low enough for IT to purchase for conference rooms.  Polycom and Tandberg became billion dollar companies. (-) A downside of the first generation products is that dedicated hardware is required for the end point. Second generation: products such as Vidyo and Blue Jeans Network. (+) These products were able to replace the hardware endpoint with software-only endpoints, and still achieve amazing video quality.  Furthermore, these software-only solutions are able to reduce the price points of HD video to only a few dollars per month – thus making high quality video affordable to most enterprises. (-) A downside of second generation products is the complicated server infrastructure.  For both Vidyo and Blue Jeans, video must first flow through a video server. Third generation: products such as Skype, Tango, WebRTC/OpenTok, Hangouts, and VSee. (+) Third generation products eliminate the server infrastructure by using peer-to-peer video streaming. They will also be web-based, so making a call is as simple as clicking on a button on a web page.  Rising star, WebRTC, allows you to build video right into the browser. (-) The problem is WebRTC is only supported by browsers Google Chrome and Opera.  Since Google does not control 100% of the browser marketing share the adoption of WebRTC still remains to be seen, (Note: We list OpenTok as WebRTC because even though it currently uses Flash, it will be using WebRTC in the future.)

VSee, The WebRTC Alternative

An alternative to WebRTC is VSee.  VSee’s simple web API makes web calling trivial.  It does not require administrator permission to run (unlike Skype), thus a simple browser plugin is all that is required to start a VSee video call. Furthermore, VSee improves on the classic P2P approach of Skype and WebRTC by enforcing end-to-end encryption at 256-bit AES.  This not only makes VSee perfect for telemedicine, but also makes all VSee conversations private and off-the-record by default.

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FuzeBox Raises $20M for online collaboration

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We heard that FuzeBox, an online collaboration and meeting tool, recently raised $20 million in Series A funding, led by Index Ventures.

“Fuze HD is a mobile and web-based collaboration service that features integrated audio conferencing as well as high-definition, synchronized video and image sharing.” – Crunchbase

FuzeBox uses Vidyo for their back engine, and this round is definitely a big win for both :)

Congratulations to FuzeBox and Vidyo!

To learn more about how VSee compares with Vidyo for your online collaboration needs, read this article on VSee: Free Alternative to Vidyo Telepresence Business Video Conference – Comparison