Current posibilities and trends
Over the past few years, videoconferencing industry noted a remarkable transformation from expensive and little available to cooperating and affordably priced. Until recently, only great companies and government organizations could afford meeting rooms provided with videoconference servers to connect more participants at the same time.
Current technology can transfer picture in full HD quality 1080p at 30 frames per second for both 2 participants call and more participants in the conference.
Port conferencing service is trying to satisfy companies of all sizes, we offer our services on the basis of operational costs, rather than purchase prices. Therefore you can join the conferences from conference rooms or from computers, with 5 or 20 participants who could be connected with each other as necessary according to your needs.
Videoconferencing history
First conferences
Simple analog videoconferences could be used since the invention of television. At the time the concerences proceeds through closed loop circuit connection of two televisions. From 1936 untill 1940 such a videoconferencing network existed between Berlin post office and few other cities in Germany. During the first piloted spaceflights NASA also started using videoconferences. But the connection then was wery expensive to operate so it could not be used for example for telemedicine, distance education or business meetings.
First videophones
In 1964 visitors of Worlds Fair in New York could see a new invention called Picturephone. The idea of connecting voice and picture – 1 frame every 2 seconds – was first implemented in 1956 by the AT&T telephone company, founded by Alexander Graham Bell himself.
Later in 1970 the Picturephone services expanded to the market and AT&T’s management expected there should be more than one milion videophones in use by the year 1980. However, the attemps at using ordinary telephone network for picture transmission failed, it was mainly because of the transmission quality and its price in general.
The development of transmission networks
After the year 1980 digital telephone transmission networks
were developed, which provided a minimum baud rate (usually 128 kbit/s) for
compressed video and audio transfers. As the ISDN network was expanding all over
the world, the first specialized systems for videoconferencing began to appear.
One of the first public videoconferencing systems was introduced on November
1984 by the PictureTel company. During the 1990's videoconferencing systems
rapidly transformed from expensive equipment and software with high demands on
the network into the standard technologies, that are available to the general
public at adequate price.
Finally, in the 1990's videoconferencing became much easier thanks to IP (Internet Protocol) . A more effective video compression was invented and in 1992 the Cornell company introduced a new program CU-SeeMee. In 1995 the first public intercontinental videoconference was performed, it connected two technology fairs – one in San Francisco (North America) and the second in Cape Town (Africa). Videoconference was than used for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics Games in Nagano in 1998 – people of all five continents could simultaneously hear Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
The rise of videoconferencing
Gradually, since the year 2000 videotelephony has been
popularized through free internet services such as Skype and other programs,
that offer video connection for low cost but also poor quality.
In May 2005 the first videoconference in HD (high definition) quality was performed in Las Vegas where the Interop conference took place. It was able to transfer 30 frames per second at 1280×720 resolution. Polycom introduced its first HD quality videoconference system in 2006. HD quality became current standard and the videoconferencing market has been constantly expanding.