Audio video conferencing is revolutionizing the web and the way people do business. With options ranging from Instant Messenger driven web cams to full motion interactive video, audio video conference has rapidly grown from being a corporate toy to something used by everyone.

It's used as a video conferencing system for churches, remote teaching system for educators and is used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to remain in touch with their families back home.

To the end-user, audio visual conferencing is sort of like the video phones that were shown on the cartoon, The Jetsons. It allows a user to see the person they're talking to and hear what they're saying, as though they were in the same room.

While people are pretty blasé about it in some ways, a bit of historical perspective will show that we truly live in an age of miracles and marvels. Within the memory of many living people, the majority of traffic worldwide was done by telegram and telephone calls had scratchy sound. Television and color television are recent inventions and the promise of a video phone has been part of science fiction since the Great Depression.


How Audio Video Conferencing Works

Now, thanks to the era of ubiquitous, cheap computing and IP packet splitting, the audio video conference is an everyday occurrence, no longer the domain of science fiction writers and Hollywood. The key, fundamental technological breakthrough is digitization of data, breaking data down into packets, sending the packets with a header, which tells the receiver how to assemble the data, putting the bits and bytes into a unified whole, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

This packet based transmission model overcame the biggest hurdle to video conferencing in earlier decades - the need to have dedicated lines for each conference, most of which were underutilized when a conference was in place.

Indeed, since all the major telephone companies in the US switched over to packet driven switching networks, the cost of running the billing system for paying by the minute on long distance calls has exceeded the cost of placing the calls by a factor of 3 to 1! These "pay one fee a month and get unlimited calls" calling plans are a manifestation of just how cheap telephony has gotten! The era of free calls over the internet to anywhere is just getting started with Vonage and Skype. Audio video conferencing is usually the high end of a suite of tools about video conferencing and conferencing in general, ranging from web based text chats, often times with other features enabled, to file transfer options, to shared applications, voice and shared whiteboard space for meetings.


Audio Video Conference Providers

There are two major vendors of audio-visual conferencing systems. The most prominent on the Internet is Microsoft with its dedicated NetMeeting program that's been bundled and upgraded with every version of Windows since Windows '95.

NetMeeting is a robust, feature-rich offering and it's free to install (or comes pre-installed) on 90% of the computers on the planet. Of particular importance is its ability to share application data with other Microsoft products, allowing real time audio visual collaboration in a conference, including data locking to prevent accidental overwriting of important documents.

It does require a fair amount of technical knowledge to set up, however, and it relies using a dedicated Microsoft product and some network infrastructure, known as Microsoft Internet Directory.

Microsoft's Internet Directory web site acts as a "white pages" for other NetMeeting subscribers. It also shows what version of Net Meeting these users have and what shared applications they're running. Like any good internet directory program, it allows users to subgroup people available by department or organization - this makes it easy to, say, set up a Net Meeting conference with everyone in the sales department.

The second vendor of note in this space is Vocaltec, with their Essentra product line, which scales from very small conferencing systems used for small businesses and personal communications to Fortune 500 companies with dedicated video conferencing systems.

Vocaltec was one of the first vendors to jump on IP telephony as a means of doing audio video conferencing, with full web support. Unlike the Microsoft product, Vocaltec takes a very call-centric view of their software, trying to sell to telephone switching stations and corporate offices in need of dedicated Voice and Audio over IP solutions.

On the back-end side, VocalTec provides network monitoring solutions and customization options to make sure that your audio video conferencing system doesn't bring your network to a grinding halt, while offering scalable infrastructure upgrades.

In many ways, where Microsoft is geared toward end consumers (along with middle sized businesses), VocalTec is geared towards installing multi-million dollar replacements to dedicated Personal Branch Exchange (PBX) systems.