HP today came up with a videoconferencing product that could work out 1,000 times cheaper than the telepresence mega-productions itself and Cisco have been pushing.
Cisco’s TelePresence or HP’s Halo can cost more than $300,000 for a boardroom suite setup, but HP’s SkyRoom could link two boardrooms for less than $300.
A demonstration, on the fringes of the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, was initially unimpressive. Two people appeared on screen speaking to each other in no better than Skype quality.
But SkyRoom showed its superiority to that free software when we were shown one of the users’ desktops being shared on screen, with a video window playing at 24 frames per second.
Your thoughts may instantly leap to sharing home videos with distant relatives in remote video chats, but SkyRoom is being aimed squarely at the enterprise.
It will require both participants to have the $149 software, as well as webcams, microphones, 400kb/s of bandwidth and above and a PC with at least a Core 2 Duo 2.33Ghz processor with 2Gb of memory.
HP says the technology was developed in its labs, with the video compression algorithms used by Nasa’s Mars rovers to send high-resolution images back to Earth.
The company doesn’t anticipate video conferencing taking place over those distances, but says travel budgets can be slashed by software that costs less than a round-trip airfare between San Francisco and LA.
