
Multi Party Video Calling - bjonathan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/multi-party-video-calling.html
======
Flemlord
We recently hired our first remote employee and we've been experimenting with
telepresence. Our conclusion is that it's slightly flaky but certainly ready
for prime-time for a technically-oriented company like us. On our connection
the picture quality isn't great (640x480), but good enough that it seems like
the person is in the room. The audio is more important than video and it syncs
perfectly with the person's lips moving which is extremely important. (That
was the major problem when we tried it 3 years ago.)

There are two services that we use:

Vidyo is a pay-for service where you can either purchase a $7000 video
conference router and use it as much as you want. Or go to a third party
provider and pay ~3c/minute. But for 1-on-1 calls we use Skype--the quality is
the same and it's free.

One of the keys to having a good experience is to buy a good speakerphone. We
use the USB Phoenix Duet (~$130). If you rely on the camera's phone it greatly
detracts from the experience.

<http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Audio-Mt202-Duet-Speakerpho/>

The camera doesn't seem that important to the experience but we like
Microsoft's LifeCam:

<http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-H5D-00001-LifeCam-Cinema/>

------
Legion
In a few months, I will be moving out of state but will continue to work
remote for my current company. One of my tasks between now and then is to get
our "system" in place for dealing with this (eventually we will take on
outside people that have never worked in-office for us, but I and a designer
that works remote already are out "pilot program").

We're small and would line to make do with consumer-level solutions. I have
been wondering if Cisco's Umi (home Telepresence) is what we're looking for.
Nothing else has really jumped out - Skype is OK for desktop-to-desktop 1-on-1
chat but I don't know if it's a solution for our meeting room...

------
jasonkester
I've been looking for a plugin API to add this capability to web apps for
several years now, and have been let down by every option out there.

The closest you can get is TokBox, which seems to have abandoned development
on its API about 2 years ago, before they got it to a working state.

Somebody needs to start a startup in this space and get it working well enough
to charge me money for it. It should take you about a day to get it working by
cobbling together Flash sample code and a license to their crazy-expensive
media server.

Let me know when it's ready and I'll beta test it for you.

~~~
bradleyland
Or you could use/contribute to the open source Red5 RTMP server. Back when I
was consulting, we developed an educational assisted-reading app using Red5
and it worked great.

------
Eliezer
I want this too. Amazing that we can't get this technology to work.

