Video Quality: It’s All About the Plumbing

Laura Shay (Laura Shay) · ‎01-20-2015

Good quality video is like good quality audio: people expect it to work, to be clear, and to connect seamlessly without much hassle. When it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, help-desk tickets start flying and meetings must be re-routed to audio calls or rescheduled – an inconvenience.

What makes video quality “good”? And, when it goes wrong, why?

It all has to do with the infrastructure - or the “plumbing” - of the video network.

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Just like good water plumbing with clear pipes that provide hot or cold water upon demand, video infrastructure must allow communication to flow easily throughout the network, connecting and disconnecting people on demand, allowing them to share their work and ideas. Polycom’s video infrastructure is called the Polycom RealPresence Platform. What makes it unique is how easily any video system - mobile app, desktop app, high end room system, or integrated classroom - can connect with great audio and video, as well as share content, regardless of whose video system it is. Because, let’s face it, it’s extremely rare to find organizations that can and want to standardize on a single vendor for everything. So, interoperating with any device, any protocol, any type of network makes it easy for Polycom customers to forget the technology and focus on what’s important: their conversations.

Imagine not having to hit the mute button

Polycom has been perfecting the Polycom RealPresence Platform for over a decade, and 2015 brings some notable enhancements. Polycom NoiseBlock is a new feature on the Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server that removes distracting noise from meeting conversations so everyone can be heard clearly - and people don’t have to mute themselves. No one likes the annoying, “Someone is typing on their keyboard - please MUTE!” requests that inevitably occur in a large multipoint meeting. The request is almost as disruptive as the person typing. NoiseBlock distinguishes those sounds from the human voice and removes them - allowing people to carry on natural, productive conversations.

Watch the Polycom NoiseBlock video:

Simplified and Improved Reporting Options for IT Admins

Polycom’s RealPresence Platform now allows administrators to add conference phones to the devices they can provision and manage - making it easy to build, manage and support a full collaborative network that includes voice and video endpoints. Administrators also now have access to a new level of reporting when the RealPresence Platform is combined with Polycom’s award winning Polycom RealPresence Group Series and new EagleEye Producer; they can count the number of people in the conference room. Why is this important? Video administrators often get asked to report on the number of hours of video conferencing, the number of meetings, and other meeting statistics - all in order to justify the cost of existing or potential new purchases. Sometimes they use those statistics to bill back internal customers. Now, they can definitively say how many people participated in those calls, as well as what conference rooms are most productive or overfull or underutilized. This allows for accurate planning, design, and allocation of precious resources and helps to provide a true ROI.

Watch the Polycom EagleEye Producer video:

Many other features were added this year to the Polycom RealPresence Platform (see the related press release from today's announcement) - all focused on enabling the network administrator with more information and tools so they can better manage their video assets and support the growing demand for video across their organizations, without having to incrementally add staff and other resources.

Additional Resources:

Press Release: Industry-First Audio and Visual Innovations from Polycom Advance Collaboration

Read the blog about Polycom Eagle Eye Producer: Improving the Customer Experience: Can highly 'produced' video collaboration be more productive?

For more information about the Polycom RealPresence Platform, watch this video and visit this website.

For more information on Polycom’s perspective on video interoperability, see the related blog posts by my colleague Michael Frendo:

Contact Polycom today for a consultation and free trial!