Web-based video conferencing has an increasingly important role to play in the enterprise today -- companies are on the hunt to cut costs and have found that by curtailing travel and relying on technology, they can do so.
First-generation video conferencing solutions that allowed for multiple parties were expensive and cumbersome, however, and companies often bought a giant headache in installation, maintenance and administration along with the solutions. Newer technologies such as WebRTC have gone a long way toward solving these headaches.
At the WebRTC Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., one of the participating companies, APEX Voice, offered a vision of its WebRTC and SIP video conferencing solution. APEX Voice Communications is a provider of service delivery platforms and multiservice application servers for interactive voice, video, text/SMS and USSD-enhanced services (IVR, IVVR, ITR and IUR) to telecom networks and telecom service providers; its flagship product is its OmniVox 3D application server.
Fabio Tylim, VP of Sales for APEX Voice, offered a practical demonstration of the company’s carrier cloud conferencing system for telecom network operators.
“Basically, it allows the network operator to host multiparty conferencing,” said Tylim. “The idea is that most enterprises today have a video conferencing solution through the APEX cloud conferencing system; telecom service operators are able to bridge diverse video conferencing systems from different enterprises. An enterprise can interact with their video conferencing with perhaps their vendor…the customers…by using the APEX bridge. In effect, what we’re doing is making the video conferencing as accessible as audio conferencing services.”
Tylim noted that the APEX Service Center platform targets specifically SIP and IMS networks, so it features traditional real-time protocol and H.264 and H.263 video codex. The company also added support for secure RTP and the VP8 video codec, so they could provide support for WebRTC, which is where the magic happens when it comes to easier multi-party video conferencing.
“In most Web conferencing solutions we see today, the challenge is that you’re receiving a video stream from each participant in a peer-to-peer situation,” explained Tylum. “In essence, if you have eight peers, you’re going to need about 1.2 megabits per second for each peer, which will require eight to sixteen megabits of bandwidth, making it unworkable for bit stream rates of VGA or 720P solution. Imagine a small office…three or four people participating in the same conference, what a headache that would be.”
APEX Voice takes care of things at the media server level, doing the transcoding and the mixing, so they can deliver to each end point, whether it’s SIP or WebRTC, the appropriate solution with eight tiles all mixed in, only requiring one to two megabit per second per conference, making the bandwidth requirement minimal and helping the company deliver what’s appropriate for the device, whether it’s a PC or a mobile device such as an iPad. Users can add other media into the video conferencing session, whether it’s live video or YouTube video from the Internet.
“Basically, what APEX provides is a software-based solution. Our core product is the application server. It allows our customers to be able to create any type of multimedia service for voice and for video, for SMS and much more.”
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
