VoIP Video Conferencing Tools

By Paul D. Kretkowski

There’s a lot of value to having everyone together at the same table for a meeting — the freewheeling discussions, the exchange of documents, the wrangling over the last chocolate-chip cookie. Too bad increasingly decentralized operations, outsourcing and flextime are making simple chats in a conference room tough to pull off.

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Luckily, VoIP video conferencing promises the next-best thing: inexpensive, spontaneous face time via your computer screen.

The two major requirements for VoIP video conferencing are a camera and sufficient bandwidth. Broadband is a must, meaning a T1 line or equivalent, but a DS3 line is even better if your company plans on doing lots of video conferencing. There are also products available to optimize your network’s IP traffic for data, VoIP and/or VoIP video conferencing as you see fit. Cameras are relatively inexpensive and increasingly come as standard equipment on both desktop and laptop PCs.

Risks and Benefits

Security is only as much a problem with VoIP video conferencing as with any other IP-based communication method, and the solutions are largely the same. Encryption, communication through the Secure Sockets Layer and VPNs (virtual private networks) are all ways of limiting who can participate in or overhear a video conference stream. Some VoIP video conferencing products automatically ensure security at the application level, for example Skype and WebEx encryption.

Application developers have made it easy and convenient to start a video conference, generally by choosing from a contact list and sending participants a message inviting them to sign in to the conference. This contrasts with traditional PSTN-based conference-calling and video-conference products, which use pricey dedicated lines and usually must be set up ahead of time. This approach might be worthwhile for large companies that need to broadcast to hundreds or thousands of people at once, but smaller businesses that prize spontaneity and flexibility over reach can choose from dozens of free or low-cost services.

Here are some VoIP video-conferencing products that stand out because of price, interesting features or easy adaptability. They range in rough order from free (Skype, iChat) or cheap (Vbuzzer) to high-end (Adobe Acrobat Connect, WebEx Meeting Center). For truly high-end conferencing, there’s also telepresence, covered in our Telepresence Resource Center.

MegaMeeting is browser-based and OS-agnostic, allowing up to 16 participants plus an unlimited number of observers. MegaMeeting could be an ideal way to broadcast meetings of city councils, school boards, legislative committees or corporate annual meetings. The Personal version of this app starts at $29 per month.

Skype’s voice quality and free service make it a great choice for one-on-one video conferencing, but for more than two participants you’ll have to find a third-party product that integrates with Skype. However, you can record Skype video calls for personal reference or to podcast later. Skype’s video quality should increase dramatically with its new High Quality Video product, which doubles the previous 320x240, 15-frames-per-second picture to 640x480 and 30 fps. The only drawback is that you need computers with dual-core processors and a specific Logitech webcam to make it work.

If picture is less important, Yugma’s “Web conferencing” product allows free chat, audio, sharing of items from a user’s desktop (documents, presentations) and the ability to mark them up, but lacks video conferencing capability. That said, Yugma integrates with Skype audio and adds collaboration functionality that Skype lacks.

If you’re on a Mac, iChat shares many of Skype’s features, has excellent voice quality and integrates automatically with iSight video cameras. It also uses less bandwidth. The new version of iChat for Mac OS X 10.5 adds more bells and whistles, which you can see in this demo.

The final free service, and the one with the most Web 2.0 name, ooVoo lets a user video conference with up to six others and adds the capability of communicating via video mail rather than email. While this is currently a Windows-only product, the company is developing Mac-friendly software. ooVoo also touts the fact that it runs its own servers, making outages like those recently experienced by Skype less likely.

WebEx Meeting Center is a hosted application that enables video conferencing, chat, document sharing and recording of the meeting. Although Meeting Center supports just four cameras, it works on any browser and (theoretically) with any phone connection speed. WebEx offers both monthly subscriptions and pay-per-meeting services.

While SightSpeed has free PC-to-PC voice calling and video conferencing, business users will want to go directly to its $4.95-per-month Pro service, which adds video-mail recording, multiparty video conferencing, and three-click file sharing for both Windows and Mac. It also allows non-SightSpeed members in on audio- and video conferences via a browser.

Ontario-based Softroute Corp.’s Vbuzzer allows PC-to-PC VoIP-based calling, faxing and video conferencing for free, with nominal rates for completion to landlines and mobiles worldwide — typically 1.5 cents per minute to the U.S., Canada and China; and 1.7 cents per minute to other countries. Vbuzzer works with relatively old or slow computers, requiring only a minimum 500 MHz chip speed, but only for Windows 2000 and XP platforms for now.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional is a powerful audio- and video conferencing product that also allows file sharing and provides a whiteboard space. Users are paying for technology and support from an established, brand-name company as much as the ability to conference — broadcast, really — with up to 2,500 people rather than 15. Prices are negotiable; a low-end version of Connect Professional goes for $39 per month or $395 per year.

Finally, AT&T Connect provides partly hosted, partly on-site, secure video conferencing for an unlimited number of communications servers. This is a heavy-duty solution that probably has a heavy-duty price tag — at least in relation to “free” — but as with the Adobe product, you’re paying AT&T Connect to handle everything for you and make VoIP work as easily as your corporate email network does now.

Got a VoIP video-conferencing product not mentioned here? Share it below in the comments.

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