12 January 2010

The big stories for the telepresence and visual collaboration industry coming out of last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the rapidly developing "Battle for the Living Room" where telepresence and videoconferencing companies, consumer electronics companies, and networking providers have unsheathed their swords in the billion dollar contest to provide two-way videoconferencing over broadband internet connections to the home. Cisco, Polycom/IBM, and Skype/Panasonic/LG have all announced products that will bring high definition videoconferencing into the living room. In the article below I take a look at the current and future applications for home telepresence and videoconferencing, the various business models, the players who announced they are heading to the living room at CES and the other potential industry participants lurking in the home office and on the family computer who just might join them.
Polycom and IBM were demonstrating "home telepresence" which has been reported as Polycom's HDX videoconferencing packaged for deployments in the home and based on IBM and Philip's "Net TV" offerings in Europe with a prototype HD conferencing solution accessible via one of their widgets. IBM will be providing the backend video network infrastructure in the cloud.

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