Video Standards Wars Heat UpVideo Standards Wars Heat Up

Customers are left with a trade-off--a solution that offers benefits but lacks interoperability; or continue to rely on lowest-common denominator open standards, giving up the benefits that extensions provide?

The recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, as well as this year's VoiceCon conference in Orlando both featured sessions on video conferencing interoperability; attempting to answer the question "how best to integrate desktop, room, and immersive telepresence systems into a single enterprise video conferencing platform?"

While the video industry has joined the VOIP market in adopting SIP as a standard for signaling, new developments in endpoint codec standards threaten to make interoperability even more challenging.

For the last few years, H.264 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) has been the dominant signaling protocol, replacing H.263 with a standard that reduced bandwidth requirements while supporting a wider variety of video systems (e.g. television/broadcast, DVD, and IP). But while standards are good for interoperability, they aren't always the best for innovation and competitive positioning. Vendors seeking to differentiate themselves, or improve on shortcomings of standards have long followed a doctrine of "embrace and extend."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed many extensions to standards are beneficial, reducing bandwidth requirements, improving support for lossy networks, or delivering new features before standards bodies catch up. Still, they raise challenges for those seeking to integrate legacy systems with newer, non-standard or extension-to-standard approaches.

Examples in the video space include Radvision, Vidyo and their partners' use of H.264 SVC (Scalable Video Coding), an enhancement to H.264 that enables high quality video over networks with high delay or packet loss; Polycom's introduction of H.264 High Profile (HP), reducing bandwidth requirements for high definition video' and Microsoft's proprietary RTvideo (and RTaudio) codecs, also with a goal of supporting high quality rich media over variably performing networks. Other vendors such as Cisco/Tandberg have talked about H.265 (also known as High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC) as a potential standards-based alternative to SVC and HP capable of meeting the same goals, though ratification and products based on HEVC are a ways away.

Integrating approaches such as H.264 SVC or HP with H.264 AVC systems requires a gateway, negating the benefits of the extension. So customers are left with a trade-off--do they replace legacy equipment with a solution that offers benefits but lacks interoperability without a gateway; or do they continue to rely on lowest-common denominator open standards, giving up the benefits that extensions provide?

This trade-off will increasingly dominate vendor selection processes over the coming months. It's also driving vendors like Vidyo to aggressively offer pricing plans designed to convince potential customers to switch to its platform rather than continue to expand competitor solutions. As the standards wars heat up, it's imperative that those responsible for architecture, deployment and management balance the opportunities afforded by new approaches with the limitations often placed on integrating existing systems.