Vidyo, Inc., the first company to deliver personal telepresence, today announced it has virtualized the first video conferencing infrastructure and delivered an HD video conference on over 100 concurrent lines. To date, virtualization in the video conferencing market has been limited to call control. Vidyo has now virtualized media processing, enabling service providers to offer unlimited multipoint scalability and low latency rate matching capability on demand to accelerate the adoption of high quality, universal video conferencing on any endpoint.
“Vidyo’s virtualization of the media plane is as significant to the video conferencing industry as VMware’s virtualization of the compute plane was to the data center,” said Ofer Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Vidyo. “Vidyo has already enabled service providers to offer telepresence calls at pennies instead of dollars per minute. Today’s technology announcement marks a new era of virtualized video conferencing with unprecedented scalability, flexibility and affordability by providing media processing when and where it is required. Hardware-based solutions are not scalable and have limited capacity for multipoint video conferencing, requiring costly MCU devices that have to be pre-provisioned in data centers instead of providing availability on-demand.”
“Virtualization has affected almost every aspect of IT, and network infrastructure is the last untapped bastion,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst, ZK Research. “Vidyo is the first company to demonstrate the impact of virtualized video conferencing in terms of scalability and economics on the most expensive part of the network infrastructure. There is no longer a reason for video conferencing to be a hardware investment; customers need to select a software-based architecture today that can address tomorrow’s future growth needs.”
Multipoint media processing mixes multiple video streams, a function traditionally performed by a transcoding multipoint control unit (MCU) which is not scalable. Expanding video conferencing services from hundreds of thousands of rooms to hundreds of millions of mobile and desktop endpoints requires a new approach for multipoint scalability. Leveraging virtual machines allows service providers and enterprise companies to scale video conferencing capacity on demand by creating a virtual machine and running a VidyoRouter, with no incremental hardware required. Companies still get all the benefits of Vidyo’s patented Adaptive Video Layering technology, which provides the most efficient bandwidth utilization, local error correction, and real time video optimization for unprecedented video quality over the Internet.