Turning Your Client’s Home
Into a Videomanor
The start of my company, cyberManor,
just over a decade ago was based on the
premise that data networks in the home
would become as commonplace as they
were on the enterprise side. The increasing
presence of always-on broadband services
to the home connected with more
powerful and less expensive computing
products created a fertile environment for
us to offer data-based home networking
solutions. Now, a decade later an equally
attractive opportunity presents itself to the
low-voltage integrator–residential video
teleconferencing.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics
Show, Creative Labs’ president and COO,
Craig McHugh,
stated that his
company believes
the use of video calling will increase exponentially.
“After experiencing video calling on lower resolution
handheld devices, users will want to integrate
higher quality video calling into their business and
professional lives,” he said. “We designed The
Creative InPerson HD to support this coming shift to
video calling by delivering a system that can upgrade
virtually any large screen HDTV or HD display into
a HD video calling system.”
And John Chambers, CEO of communications
giant CISCO, helped to promote the recent
introduction of CISCO’s new UMI teleconference
product by proclaiming that video conferencing in the
home will not only change the way we communicate
with family members, but enhance education to the home, and healthcare
solutions between doctors and their patients that can now stay at home.
We have already seen Apple’s introduction of FaceTime video
conferencing on its iPod touch and iPhone platforms, and it is strongly
anticipated that the next release of the company’s iPad will have a camera
on both the front and back to support video conferencing. One might
anticipate that a future software upgrade of the AppleTV platform will
support FaceTime so that these mobile devices can directly videoconference
with the HDTV in the family room. Expect the same video teleconferencing
capabilities from all the Google Android camera-enabled tablets shown at
this year’s CES show with the Logitech Google TV platform.
In the last few short months we have recognized the phenomenal success and power of the Microsoft’s new Kinect product platform. Initially
introduced as a product to enhance a hands-free Xbox gaming experience,
it is now seen as a platform for a whole host of new applications–a key one
being video teleconferencing between users of the Kinect platform and
other Microsoft Messenger clients. Unique to this product is its camera
capability to follow the user around the room while you are talking.
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John Chambers, CEO of communications giant CISCO, helped to promote his company’s
new UMI teleconference product by proclaiming that video conferencing in the home
will not only change the way we communicate with family members, but enhance
education to the home, and healthcare solutions between doctors and their patients
that can now stay at home.
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It is clear that many of the larger consumer electronics companies have
or will soon be offering video teleconferencing products for the home.
As custom electronic integrators we probably will
not make high margins on the sale of this hardware
but we will make money on the integration of these
hardware products into our client’s AV rack, the
HDTV set, and the programming of the video
conferencing control into our universal remote
solutions. We may even sell an additional HDTV
in the office or another location in the home just to
enable these video teleconferencing solutions.
Teleconferencing products will differ on initial
price, software platform, residential broadband
speed requirements, camera capabilities, number
of simultaneous video sessions, and web hosting
services and prices. Understanding these parameters
from various manufactures will put you in the
strongest position to offer the best value-added
solution to your clients.
To those initial integrators
that fully understand the range of
teleconferencing solutions from
companies like Apple, Cisco,
Microsoft, Logitech, and Creative
Labs (to name a few), you may
find that your knowledge of video
teleconferencing solutions for the
home may just be the advantage
that rewards your whole-house
integration proposal over those of
your competitors.