I think the first video call I did from a computer might have used Skype, but before long there were a number of ways to call someone as long as you had a webcam available. Somewhat parallel to the story of hardware video codecs are software-based codecs. Of course, that meant we got to sell you two systems instead of just the one!Д«ut the dream of putting videoconferencing on every personвЂ™s desk wasnвЂ™t going awayвЂ¦ The Cloud The company I worked for at the time built an application layer on top of the T.120 protocol so you could remotely control someone elseвЂ™s room system from your own. It was accompanied by multiple displays, retractable screens, audio systems, and other things that necessitated a programmable control system. If you were going to put that much money into one device, you wanted to put it somewhere it captured a lot of attention and use: boardrooms, executive offices, auditoriums, etc. Sleek and modern, but a whole lot more plastic, too. It was fluid, there werenвЂ™t many network glitches, and it just worked most of the time. This was all CIF-resolution video and G.722 audio and I remember thinking it looked and sounded amazing. It was typically bestвЂ“but not greatвЂ“effort. The alternative was placing calls over the public Internet which had zero assurances about packet loss or latency. All you could do was hang up, try again, and hope youвЂ™d get a different route through the PSTN. Video dialing over ISDN had its unique problems anyway: sometimes not all channels would connect (for any number of reasons outside of your control) and the call would degrade. Broadband Internet access was readily available and getting progressively cheaper every year. Moving away from dedicated ISDN circuits to ubiquitous IP networks made perfect sense. It wasnвЂ™t uncommon in this period for customers to rely on the availability of ISDN while gradually moving everything over to H.323 systems. TANDBERG and Polycom reigned supreme in that landscape, and the ITU was working on interoperability for things like firewall traversals. When I started in AV 16 years ago, videoconferencing was already cemented as a cornerstone of daily business. Before I get into the cloud, I want to take a look back at how I got here.

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