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As more and more businesses go remote, these are ways to be more effective and efficient on conference calls. Update: Since this story originally ran, the worldwide coronavirus outbreak has made video conferencing an essential component to keeping businesses running. This story originally ran in 2017, but the advice is as relevant as ever. Here are 10 do’s and don’ts that I believe elevate the overall experience of a video conference…..Story continues..
Source: Entrepreneur
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Videotelephony (also known as videoconferencing or video call) is the use of audio and video for simultaneous two-way communication. Today, videotelephony is widespread. There are many terms to refer to videotelephony. Videophones are standalone devices for video calling (compare Telephone). In the present day, devices like smartphones and computers are capable of video calling, reducing the demand for separate videophones.
Videoconferencing implies group communication. Videoconferencing is used in telepresence, whose goal is to create the illusion that remote participants are in the same room. The concept of videotelephony was conceived in the late 19th century, and versions were available to the public starting in the 1930s. Early demonstrations were installed at booths in post offices and shown at various world expositions. In 1970, AT&T launched the first commercial personal videotelephone system.
In addition to videophones, there existed image phones which exchanged still images between units every few seconds over conventional telephone lines. The development of advanced video codecs, more powerful CPUs, and high-bandwidth Internet service in the late 1990s allowed digital videophones to provide high-quality low-cost color service between users almost any place in the world.
Applications of videotelephony include sign language transmission for deaf and speech-impaired people, distance education, telemedicine, and overcoming mobility issues. News media organizations have used videotelephony for broadcasting. The concept of videotelephony was first conceived in the late 1870s, both in the United States and in Europe, although the basic sciences to permit its very earliest trials would take nearly a half century to be discovered.
The prerequisite knowledge arose from intensive research and experimentation in several telecommunication fields, notably electrical telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television. Simple analog videophone communication could be established as early as the invention of the television. Such an antecedent usually consisted of two closed-circuit television systems connected via coax cable or radio.
An example of that was the German Reich Postzentralamt (post office) videotelephone network serving Berlin and several German cities via coaxial cables between 1936 and 1940. The development of videotelephony as a subscription service started in the latter half of the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States, spurred notably by John Logie Baird and AT&T’s Bell Labs. This occurred in part, at least with AT&T, to serve as an adjunct supplementing the use of the telephone.
A number of organizations believed that videotelephony would be superior to plain voice communications. Attempts at using normal telephony networks to transmit slow-scan video, such as the first systems developed by AT&T Corporation, first researched in the 1950s, failed mostly due to the poor picture quality and the lack of efficient video compression techniques.
During the first crewed space flights, NASA used two radio-frequency (UHF or VHF) video links, one in each direction. TV channels routinely use this type of videotelephony when reporting from distant locations. The news media were to become regular users of mobile links to satellites using specially equipped trucks, and much later via special satellite videophones in a briefcase. This technique was very expensive, though, and was not adopted for applications such as telemedicine, distance education, and business meetings.
Decades of research and development culminated in the 1970 commercial launch of AT&T’s Picturephone service, available in select cities. However, the system was a commercial failure, chiefly due to consumer apathy, high subscription costs, and lack of network effect—with only a few hundred Picturephones in the world, users had extremely few contacts they could actually call, and interoperability with other videophone systems would not exist for decades.
In the 1980s, digital telephony transmission networks became possible, such as with ISDN networks. During this time, there was also research into other forms of digital video and audio communication. Many of these technologies, such as the Media space, are not as widely used today as videoconferencing but were still an important area of research. The first dedicated systems started to appear as ISDN networks were expanding throughout the world. One of the first commercial videoconferencing systems sold to companies came from
PictureTel Corp., which had an initial public offering in November, 1984. In 1984, Concept Communication in the United States created a circuit board for standard personal computers that doubled the video frame rate of typical digital videotelephone systems from 15 to 30 frames per second, and reduced the cost from $100,000 to $12,000. The company also secured a patent for a codec for full-motion videoconferencing, first demonstrated at AT&T Bell Labs in 1986.
Very expensive videoconferencing systems continued to rapidly evolve throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Proprietary equipment, software, and network requirements gave way to standards-based technologies that were available for anyone to purchase at a reasonable cost. While videoconferencing technology was initially used primarily within internal corporate communication networks, one of the first community service uses of the technology started in 1992 through a unique partnership with PictureTel and IBM.
Over the next 15 years, Project DIANE (Diversified Information and Assistance Network) grew to use a variety of videoconferencing platforms to create a multi-state cooperative public service and distance education network consisting of several hundred schools, libraries, science museums, zoos and parks, and many other community-oriented organizations.
Advances in video compression allowed digital video streams to be transmitted over the Internet, which was previously difficult due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed video. The DCT algorithm was the basis for the first practical video coding standard that was useful for online videoconferencing, H.261, standardised by the ITU-T in 1988, and subsequent H.26x video coding standards.
In 1992 CU-SeeMe was developed at Cornell by Tim Dorcey et al. In 1995 the first public videoconference between North America and Africa took place, linking a technofair in San Francisco with a techno-rave and cyberdeli in Cape Town. At the 1998 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Nagano, Japan, Seiji Ozawa conducted the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony simultaneously across five continents in near-real-time.
Kyocera conducted a two-year development campaign from 1997 to 1999 that resulted in the release of the VP-210 Visual Phone, the first mobile colour videophone that also doubled as a camera phone for still photos. The camera phone was the same size as similar contemporary mobile phones, but sported a large camera lens and a 5 cm (2 inch) colour TFT display capable of displaying 65,000 colors, and was able to process two video frames per second.
Videotelephony was popularized in the 2000s via free Internet services such as Skype and iChat, web plugins supporting H.26x video standards, and online telecommunication programs that promoted low cost, albeit lower quality, videoconferencing to virtually every location with an Internet connection.
Videotelephony became even more widespread through the deployment of video-enabled mobile phones such as 2010s iPhone 4, plus videoconferencing and computer webcams which use Internet telephony. In the upper echelons of government, business, and commerce, telepresence technology, an advanced form of videoconferencing, has helped reduce the need to travel.
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