Vidyo: My Next New Favorite Ap - Personal Telepresence

Cisco telepresence, HP Halo? These are the telepresence (i.e. high resolution, life-sized video conferencing applications) aps to the Stars of American Business. But for you and me - ordinary folks - there's now an almost equally good offering as well: Vidyo.

While a Cisco telepresence room costs $300,000 to setup and install and $300,000 in monthly network fees over two years, Vidyo costs only $99 a month for 1200 minutes a month. Here's the 2008 demo:



I heard about it last night at a talk by Chuck Houston, executive director of Media X at Stanford University, in his presentation for the CIO Meetup group. And boy is Vidyo cool.

One of the biggest markets is anticipated to be boomers who want to keep tabs on their aging parents.

Vidyo's web site features this video showing the quality difference between its personal telepresence ap and "well known" (would that be Skype?) to show what a difference it makes to reduce blur and fuzzy images with crisp and clear ones. Vidyo supports HD as well as H.264-SVC (the latter automatically scales the streaming speed to the correct streaming settings for the end user's device).

Have a look and then visit the Vidyo web site for more details and a more engaging video here.

Web Videos: Not So Short Anymore

Today's New York Times features a story on how web video makers are going longer form with their offerings. See it here.