Realize VoIP, August 2010

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In This Issue

Editor's Note

By Amir Zmora, VP Marketing

"Imitation is more valuable than innovation". This statement sounds neither right nor popular, yet look around you: many of the successful brands have taken an idea and brought it to excellence -- and hence to business success. This statement is made by Prof. Oded Shenkar, based on his extensive research that was also documented in his book "Copycats". You can read more about it in the Harvard Business Review.

Imitators often overshadow innovators
Source: Harvard Business Review

How does Prof. Shenkar's statement relate to this newsletter? It entered my mind when I contemplated consumer video chat. PC-based video chat has been available for some time, but making it popular required a great company like Skype to take a service already made available by others and take it one step further, from a niche service toward mass consumer usage. Today Skype reports that out of the 36.1 million call minutes in Q4 2009, more than a third were video calls. Skype actually did the same thing to VoIP before.

Apple has just launched FaceTime. Will Apple do for mobile video chat what it has done for mobile browsing? And for Smartphones. And for App Stores. And for buying and listening to music...

At RADVISION we have been feeling the Apple effect very strongly in the last few months. Since the rumors of iPhone 4 with its front-facing camera, and those of iPad, we have been receiving numerous requests from our customers to provide them with Android-based video chat technology for their soon-to-be-launched personal devices. We have also been hearing rumors about other giant consumer electronic (CE) companies going this route; one example is the rumor about Samsung's Galaxy Tab, apparently to be announced as we release this newsletter.

Since we consider consumer video chat to be one of the drivers of video communications proliferation in the consumer and enterprise segments, we have created a comprehensive solution for our customers to quickly bring their Android based solution to market. And, of course, we are releasing this newsletter to give you more information about this growing trend.

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The Promise of Consumer Video Chat

By Tsahi Levent-Levi, Director of Technology and Solution

Video communication has been around for more than a decade, but consumers were not part of it. The reasons for this varied from lack of need, to high cost and unavailable infrastructure, to social and psychological reasons.

In the past year all this has changed. Consumers are now making more video calls than enterprises. They are adopting this new user experience in ways that were previously unimaginable:

Apple launched the iPhone 4 FaceTime service with a plan to reinvent mobile video calling, a service that has been up and running for several years. While today the service is available only between iPhone 4 devices over WiFi, it may be expanded in the future to support 3G interfaces and interoperability with other services.
Skype is working on multiple fronts in trying to penetrate consumer electronics (CE). With their new debut, SkypeKit (an SDK for CE vendors), and their Skype TV initiative, Skype is pushing video to the home.
Google announced its support of Android for televisions in its Google TV initiative. Its partner Logitech might come up with a capable camera to compete against Skype TV.
Chatroulette, the Flash-based web service that allows people to make anonymous video calls has been a huge success -- which goes to show that people want to see each other while they talk.

Consumer video calling is moving on three fronts:

Desktop solutions, where users sitting in front of their PCs engage in video calls. This is where the mass market of video calling is today.
Mobile handsets, where video calls are made on the go from mobile phones, tablets and netbooks. While this option has been around for years, Apple could change the way we think about mobile video calling.
Televisions, where users can make video calls from the comfort of their home. This can also be done using external set-top boxes or other home devices.

Video calls/chats by screen. Source: GigaOm Pro report

If you are developing a consumer electronics device that is connected to a screen, you should consider using video chatting services -- they are bound to add value to your product.

Standardization for Consumer Video Chat

By Sagi Subocki, Products Manager

For consumer video chat to be adopted by the masses, it needs to work on a standardized mechanism that will allow multiple vendors to offer interoperable solutions -- in much the same way as voice calling systems operate today.

Video telephony standards (CC http://www.wordle.net/)

Looking at today's standards of choice for consumer video chat, there are three main proponents:

Skype, which use their own closed, proprietary solution, with a huge user base
Google Talk, based on XMPP/Jingle standard, not offered by other vendors
SIP, a standardized protocol used by most of the VoIP industry

While Skype and Google offer their own complete solutions, these are closed within their own cloud-based service offering. SIP provides an offering that allows both over the top vendors and incumbent service providers to offer interoperable services. An obvious example is Apple's selection of SIP in their recently launched FaceTime service on iPhone 4: not yet an interoperable solution, but based on the SIP standard.

Today, SIP is being used by hosted service providers and PBX vendors for VoIP solutions. Extending these into the video realm is the next logical step. For incumbent service providers (cellular, cable and fixed line), the standard architecture of choice is IMS, which is again based on the SIP protocol, to ensure interoperability.

From a video coding perspective, the video codec of choice for all visual communication solutions is H.264, either in its AVC or SVC variant. While other video codecs exist, H.264 has been adopted by most vendors and is being integrated by chipset vendors in their offerings.

Moving forward, vendors wanting to offer consumer video chat services and solutions will need to decide on the set of protocols they adopt. Selecting SIP for their signaling and H.264 for their video codec is the most logical choice.

Android's Video Dreams

By Amit Lavi, Product Manager

Consumer video chat is based on three main screens: PC desktops, televisions and mobile devices.

In the mobile devices space, we can see the first steps toward video calling solutions:

Apple's introduction of iPhone 4's FaceTime service
Cisco's debut of their Cius tablet, capable of running HD video conferencing for the enterprise

Requirements from vendors developing any kind of consumer device now include a touch display, a microphone and a front-facing camera. The next logical step is to offer a solid video calling client as part of the device. Today, vendors select Android as their operating system of choice, owing to its many advantages over the existing alternatives.

The challenge that remains is how to offer video calling services on Android devices. While there is a large variety of chipsets supporting Android, they all converge into a common solution, where a strong host chip runs the Android operating system itself and additional accelerators are used for specific multimedia tasks, such as graphics and video coding.

On the software architecture side, issues such as the Java Application Framework and the Dalvik Virtual Machine affect the way integration needs to take place. These issues mandate a solution that is tailored specifically for the Android operating system and hardware platform.

The good news is that this is exactly what RADVISION is now offering with its brand new BEEHD for Personal Devices:

We have taken our BEEHD solution and ported it from Embedded Linux to the Android operating system. We have tweaked and fine-tuned the Media Engine to plug into the video codecs available on Android, and added a JNI wrapper to work through the Dalvik VM. To top it all off, we are offering extensions to the existing major components in Android's Application Framework, allowing seamless integration into the Android operating system along with custom integration into the specific platform of the CE vendor.

Product News and Updates

The following are new RADVISION product releases:

We have just launched two new video quality analysis and monitoring products:
- Video Quality Monitor - a monitoring solution for voice and video communications
- Video Quality SDK - a developer tool for assessing the quality of video streams
The new VCE6467 Trial Version 1.0 solution, developed jointly with TI, has been released
Version 2.0 of BEEHD for Desktop has been released. Among other new features, it now supports H.323 and SIP simultaneously.

The new versions above are available to customers under maintenance agreements.

Community Apology

By Tsahi Levent-Levi, Director of Technology and Solution

Last week, some of our community members received a somewhat cryptic email with broken links. I would like to use this opportunity to apologize for this occurrence.

As we are now in the process of ramping up our community site for the next batch of enhancements, work is being done on the site's infrastructure. During this effort, one of our engineers tried to troubleshoot a forum feature. For this purpose he posted a message to a temporary forum, which caused the email to be sent out.

As a result of this incident, we have instructed our engineers to work only with dummy accounts in their development environment. We are also working to isolate the development environment even further.

In the next issue of our newsletter, I will have some interesting new community features to write about.

Blog Highlights

Enjoy a quick glance at some recent interesting blog posts on our blog network:

Networking: Ran Arad explains issues related to TCP socket closing
Dating: Sagee Ben-Zedeff shares his view on Apple's new dating service: FaceTime
Standards and interoperability: Tsahi Levent-Levi believes standards don't necessarily mean interoperability

Here are two more posts that have interested our readers in the past two months:

Video calling from mobile to telepresence has been in the news lately. Here are some posts that talk about these two extremes
Resolution wars seem so important in our HD world -- but do they really make sense? Sagee Ben-Zedeff mulls the need for some real innovation in enterprise video solutions

We would also like to make you aware of an initiative we are running: a series of posts about designing hardware for HD video conferencing. You can follow it here.

While we are on the topic of video calling, here's what the iPhone will look like a few years from now:

In the Press

We announced our new client framework suitable for desktop, embedded and mobile devices: our BEE family of products
Texas Instruments, together with RADVISION, launches a new HD video communication engine integrated into a single chip, called VCE6467
TrendChip Technologies Corp. integrates RADVISION's MTF in their IAD solution
RADVISION joined a new UC IOT forum, called UCIF

Webinars and Events

Past Webinars

We're ramping up our webinars in 2010, bringing fresh content. As we are heading towards the summer vacation, here is what we've been up to so far:

Title	Where?
The Hidden Challenges Of Developing HD Visual Communication Products	View online
Voice and Video over IP Communications: Assessing and Improving User Experience	View online
Unified Communication HD Visual Communications for the Masses	View online
LTE - The Future of IMS	View online
SIP Beyond Telecom	View online

Customer Satisfaction Survey

Your opinion matters to us. If you are (or were) a RADVISION customer of any of our developer tools, we would appreciate if you would complete our Customer Satisfaction Survey. It will only take a few minutes of your time and would help us a great deal. We will be leaving this survey open for you to fill in at your own leisure -- but why wait? Take the survey now.

In Closing

This newsletter aims to be useful to you. If you are not finding any value, tell us how we can improve. For more information from RADVISION, you are invited to follow the links below: