Avistar's videoconf client does multiple streams, dynamicall

Over the last few months or so at ZDNet, we've been playing around with various IP-based videoconferencing options in hopes of finding some way to leverage the video capabilities for pumping content between locations for usage in the videos we produce on line. For example, we'd like to have a two-pane video version of the Dan and David Show. In the course of doing this, we've become painfully aware of the sensitivity of these systems to bandwidth constraints some of which are very corporate in nature.

For example, in an effort to pump video back and forth between my home office and our San Francisco studios (which are in behind CNET's corporate firewall), the bandwidth constraint wasn't on the home office end. It was on the corporate side where the people in charge of CNET's network connection were, for obvious reasons, not about to give an IP-based video conferencing system carte blanche access to the company's Internet connection. If they did, the videoconferencing system could easily overwhelm the connection, the net result of which could impact all the other traffic. It's a scenario that's probably repeated in corporations and businesses everywhere. So far, in the case of our experiments, the results have not been that good. Latency is a key issue and we've tried to the best of the abilities of the systems we're working with to throttle the audio and video quality in hopes of minimizing the latency but have had little luck.

for more, visit:http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=859

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