The Development Trend of Videoconferencing

Since 1964, the world's first analog technology picture phone MOD-I was born in the United States Bell Labs, video conferencing technology and the corresponding standards have been in the process of continuous development. And video conferencing in general has experienced the analog video conferencing, digital video conferencing and international unified standards of digital video conferencing three stages.

The 1960s developed countries began the analog video conferencing research, and gradually commercialized. Early video conferencing system to analog transmission, although the transmission is only black and white images and is limited to between two locations, but video conferencing still takes up a lot of bandwidth, the cost is very high, and therefore did not get the development. The representative of the earliest developed U.S. Bell Labs video phone, the British BT company's 1MHZ bandwidth of black and white conference videoconferencing. To the mid-1970s, digital image and voice coding technology has made great progress, so that the analog system began to gradually shift to digital systems. However, due to the early video conferencing does not have a unified standard, are realized on the basis of their own R & D technology, making it difficult to achieve interoperability of a variety of video conferencing products.　　Since the 80's, with the development of microelectronics, computers, digital signal processing and image processing technology, video conferencing theoretical research as well as practical system development has been rapid development. In this period, the digital video conferencing system to replace the analog video conferencing system, its transmission image occupies a narrower frequency band, the quality is also better, and thus get the development, in some areas began to form a video conferencing network, such as the early 80's, Japan and the United States developed 2Mbps color digital video conferencing system, the formation of a non-standard domestic video conferencing network. the mid-80's, the large-scale integrated circuits The mid-80s, the rapid development of large-scale integrated circuits, image coding and decoding technology breakthroughs, channel cost reduction for video conferencing to practical to provide a good development conditions. However, the digital video conferencing system in this period has been using specialized codec hardware and software, requiring interoperable conference terminals to use the codec must come from the same manufacturer, otherwise it can't work properly, thus greatly hindering the expandability of the video conferencing system and interoperability between the systems.　　Since the 90's, based on the TCP/IP protocol internet network size, the number of users and the volume of business has been exponential growth, especially in the mid-90's, the rapid development of the computer Internet on the telecommunication industry has had a huge and profound impact. Multimedia communication systems based on packet-switched networks have gradually become the focus of attention of researchers and telecom, network and computer vendors.

Teleconferencing has gone through two stages: analog teleconferencing and digital teleconferencing. Analog conference TV was the early conference TV, which was available in the 1970s for this kind of communication service. At that time, black and white images were transmitted and were limited to conferences between two locations. Nonetheless, videoconferencing took up a very wide bandwidth and was expensive, so this type of videoconferencing was not developed. In the early days of videoconferencing in China, the government was the largest and most dominant user of the videoconferencing market. In recent years, more industry users began to realize the importance of video conferencing, the number of video equipment users continue to increase, the user industry distribution field is also more and more extensive, from the initial government and telecommunications sector, the development of public security, procuratorate, courts, banks, securities, insurance, education, taxation and other industries. Compared with Europe and the United States, although China's distance education and telemedicine has just started, video conferencing system in these two areas of application is not wide enough, but from the perspective of development can be seen, the last two years, the application of the above two areas is showing a booming momentum, the future will be the rapid development of the industry. Domestic market video conferencing is mainly used in the following industries: government; finance, securities, banking; energy; transportation, public security army; foreign enterprises and large enterprises; medical and education industry. With the deepening of government informatization, as well as the development of e-government around the world, around the party and government network of the second phase, the third phase of the expansion project, in the next few years, for the video conferencing demand will be the largest from the government sector. Due to the impact of financial and conceptual factors, video conferencing in education, medical applications and did not achieve the desired results, the vendors in these two areas are very limited share. However, because video conferencing has obvious characteristics and advantages in technology, its application value will certainly be further recognized by the education and medical communities. Small and medium-sized enterprises should be the future focus of attention to the field, this part of the huge number of users, generally for the device terminal requirements are lower, and fewer connection points. This requires vendors to provide relatively inexpensive products, a full set of solutions, as well as high-quality after-sales service, at the same time, due to the huge number of potential users of this part, so vendors and agents should be further strengthened marketing efforts. Technical strength gap is not large, the price will become a key factor in winning the competition. Domestic manufacturers in the price of equipment has a great advantage, manufacturers in the promotion, should pay attention to mitigate the impact of high product price.

The use of video conferencing can be realized with more than one person at the same time to communicate, people can also speak face to face. In offices and educational institutions around the globe, videoconferencing is also able to be used for learning, training and meeting with contacts without the need to travel. Not only does videoconferencing save money on phone calls, but by eliminating travel it also helps to improve the environment and reduces the business expense of arranging travel for employees to travel to meetings. In addition, friends and family are able to utilize videoconferencing to stay in touch with loved ones living in other countries, and even soldiers fighting overseas are able to utilize videoconferencing to stay in touch with loved ones back home. Videoconferencing solutions are viable during economic downturns and are critical applications when the economy improves. Previous recessions have shown that businesses that invest in IT and communications during economic crises will be in a strong competitive position after the economic storm passes, and even be able to take market share from their competitors. For those companies that are able and willing to continue investing in IT during a recession, visual communications and collaboration products and services should be a core part of their survival strategy. This investment will put these businesses in a favorable competitive position when the economy recovers. With the development of society, the application of video conferencing is becoming more and more widespread, while the requirements for video and audio quality, data collaboration **** enjoyment, flexibility and ease of use, ease of management are becoming more and more stringent. Early videoconferencing systems are usually composed of specialized hardware equipment, including multi-point control unit MCU and video terminals, and each other to connect with a dedicated network. The high cost of hardware and special network constraints on the hardware video conferencing system can only be used for the government, the army, large enterprise groups, it is difficult to small and medium-sized enterprises, the popularity of daily application. With the improvement of computer processing power and software technology, video conferencing system also began to software development, more and more based on the server side / client mode of software products, leading video conferencing to office communication, business training, marketing and other areas of expansion, and this relatively low-cost, convenient application is gradually accepted by most of the small and medium-sized enterprises and institutions. Network video conferencing is the latest development of software video conferencing, which is completely based on the Internet Internet, support for global collaborative work; at the same time, the most commonly used browser mode in the Internet era, greatly expanding the application scenarios and locations. China's video conferencing system market size has been expanding year by year, in 2009 the industry market size of 5.17 billion yuan, compared with 4.23 billion yuan in 2008, an increase of 22.22%; in 2010 the market size of 6.63 billion yuan, an increase of 28.24% year-on-year, the largest increase in recent years. Combined with the growth of major companies, the industry's growth rate of about 19% in 2011 and about 10% in 2012, it is speculated that its market size will reach 7.89 billion yuan and 8.76 billion yuan, respectively.

In the future, the use of video conferencing systems will further penetrate into all walks of life. The proportion of Chinese government users using video conferencing has reached about 30%, finance, energy, communications, transportation, health care, education and other key industries and organizations are also increasing the proportion of use, but there is still a huge space for development. Government video conferencing network will cover the townships, finance, telecommunications, energy and other industries will also begin to finer market management, which will drive the faster development of the video conferencing system market has played a great role in promoting.

In contrast, the vast number of small and medium-sized enterprises will be the video conferencing system industry development of new growth points. The number of small and medium-sized legal entities in China exceeds 50 million, accounting for more than 99% of the total number of enterprises. As costs continue to decrease, the enterprise's cost control and operational efficiency requirements continue to improve, the video system will become an important way for small and medium-sized enterprises to solve the above problems. Therefore, the market capacity of video conferencing system for small and medium-sized enterprises will show substantial growth. During the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, the development speed of China's video conferencing system industry will be significantly faster than the "11th Five-Year Plan", and it is expected that by the end of the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, the market size of China's video conferencing systems will reach 22 billion yuan. Trend 1: the integration of hardware and software video conferencing

In order to meet the anytime, anywhere access to the meeting, and take into account the ultimate high-definition and virtual real venue of the needs of business users, software video conferencing and hardware video conferencing (telepresence) will move towards integration. The development of converged meetings will go through three stages.

The first stage, the realization of hardware video conferencing, software video conferencing and UC (Unified Communications) interconnectivity, the initial realization of ordinary telephones, IP phones, UC soft terminals, Web clients, mobile terminals and smart real conference room terminals can be accessed at the same time the meeting. The program not only retains the experience of two different types of meetings, but also can realize multiple terminals to participate in the meeting at the same time.

If an enterprise needs to hold a very important formal meeting, the branch offices can use the Zhizhen meeting room terminal to participate in the meeting, and the traveling employees can remotely access to the software video conferencing system through the PC (UC Soft Terminal or Web Client), and then access to the Zhizhen meeting place through the cascade of the hardware and software video conferencing.

The second stage is to realize unified venue control and conference management from the platform architecture. At the signaling control level to realize the unification of H.323/MCU-based hardware video conferencing and SIP/HTTP-based software desktop video conferencing, through the SIP protocol and unified AS (Application Server) to control access to various types of terminals, various types of venue media resource management; and provide unified network management for the convergence of conference system for the overall management of network equipment, to provide a unified management Portal for business configuration, conference booking to provide a unified portal and conference management experience ......

The third stage, to achieve the integration of various types of media resources servers, to provide a unified media convergence and transcoding center, the media center according to the terminal's ability to push the appropriate coding format code streams to the multimedia terminal, to achieve a consistent multi-screen experience. Realize consistent multi-screen experience. Through the multimedia capability *** platform, it can realize unified deployment and capability *** enjoyment of audio, video, text and data, realize all kinds of terminals and media center *** enjoyment of audio and video engine, improve reuse capability, and finally complete the complete integration of all kinds of conference terminals and conference system.

Trend 2: low-bandwidth, high-quality audio and video

With the development of voice coding and decoding technology, the conference voice will be developed to broadband multichannel: 8KHz monoà22KHz stereoà22KHz multichannelàvirtual sound field. At the same time, when the desktop terminal accesses the conference from the public network, it can use intelligent algorithms to give the best coding and transmission scheme adapted to the current network according to the network transmission quality, combined with the network model to ensure that when the network changes, it can still provide users with a good business experience. For example, when the network becomes worse, the intelligent use of low-bandwidth voice codecs to ensure normal voice calls; and when the network improves, the use of broadband codecs to enhance the user experience. More importantly, in this change process, voice quality can realize smooth change.

Similarly, the video media will evolve from SD to HD in a comprehensive manner, with higher resolution and better smoothness: codec technology will be upgraded from H.263 and H.264 to H.264HP and H.265 to achieve 1080P video effect in 1M bandwidth.

Trend 3: Sharing and Collaboration

The continuous development of modern enterprises, cross-geographical virtual teams have become the norm, which also prompted the meeting from communication-centered to sharing and collaboration-centered. Traditional hardware video conferencing realizes voice and video information communication, software video conferencing introduces the ability of data collaboration on the basis of audio and video, and is able to provide collaborative functions such as screen **** enjoyment, document **** enjoyment, e-whiteboard, text chat, e-voting, etc. However, it does not yet provide the dissemination of meeting content, classification, search, asynchronous sharing of many-to-many and collaboration, and it needs to further expand its collaborative It needs to further expand its collaboration capabilities.

Combined with the social network means of information dissemination, the conference system will introduce "meeting space" to achieve the dissemination of meeting content and **** enjoyment, before the meeting can be uploaded by the organizer of the meeting or participants in the meeting, and send a meeting notice to the participants to understand the theme of the meeting, based on the permissions of the document can be modified,

After the meeting, the meeting information, meeting video and minutes of the meeting can be categorized and labeled, providing on-demand and download, and providing a discussion space for the meeting to follow up discussions and exchanges. Thus, on the basis of information communication to do the dissemination of information to achieve the enterprise virtual team sharing and collaboration.

Trend 4: simple and fast meeting experience

With the application of various new technologies, the meeting function has become more and more powerful, but the meeting business experience provided to the user should be towards a more simple and fast direction. The use of conference services mainly includes two scenarios of conference convening and conference joining. In the convening of the meeting, in addition to being able to log in Portal to make a meeting reservation, but also with UC and other mainstream enterprise application software integration, through the UC soft terminal, Outlook, Notes, Office, Enterprise OA or other application software client a key to initiate a meeting to convene, so that the meeting habits and the use of other office software in the same way. For example, when a user receives an email and wants to directly call a meeting to discuss about the topic, he or she can directly click on the button in the email to initiate a meeting to call a meeting, and the system will automatically take the subject of the email as the topic of the meeting, take the content of the email as the meeting materials, take the sender and all the recipients as the members of the meeting and make the meeting appointments to realize the emotionally-aware meeting call.

Additionally, meeting groups and meeting templates can be created to initiate a meeting using the default configuration. After a meeting is booked, the system automatically creates a "meeting space" and sends a meeting notification to attendees, either by email, SMS, or other means. After receiving the meeting notification, participants can click on the link in Outlook to enter the meeting, or click on the meeting list in the UC soft terminal to enter the meeting, or reply to a text message to enter the meeting by the system's outbound cell phone voice when they can't access the meeting through a PC.

During the meeting, participants can realize one-click transfer in multiple desktop terminals. For example, if a user is currently participating in a remote training session via PC access, and the user wants to pour a glass of water in the pantry, the user can use the one-click transfer function to transfer the conference sound to his or her cell phone, and then take the cell phone to the pantry to pour the water, and then return to his or her seat to transfer the conference call back to the PC so that he or she doesn't miss out on any of the training content.

This is the ultimate in simplicity for users, whether they are calling a meeting or attending one.

Trend 5: mobile terminal access (BYOD)

With the development of the mobile Internet and the popularity of mobile broadband, enterprise employees around their own mobile devices (smart phones, tablets) more and more, and formed a stable habit of use, they are eager to be able to use their own devices familiar with the flexibility of their own at any time, anywhere to participate in the meeting.

On the one hand, this can not only improve efficiency and reduce enterprise costs; on the other hand, it can also significantly reduce enterprise energy consumption, and enhance the comprehensive benefits of business operations.

Converged meeting will also support the addition of various types of mobile terminals, in addition to providing audio and video communication, but also be able to provide screen **** enjoy, whiteboard collaboration and message chat and other functions, to facilitate the convenience of enterprise employees in the airport, the hotel, at home, and other occasions to conveniently participate in the meeting.

The interconnectivity of the conference system is the new industry hotspot, which will also greatly enhance the use of enterprise conference system, the ability to collaborate at any time and any place will also be constantly innovating business forms to inject new vitality, help enterprises to obtain a broader space for development, more agile market competitiveness. With the development of the economy and the intensification of competition, the enterprise demand for video conferencing system is growing. Therefore, the video conferencing towards the problem has become the main problem plaguing the video conferencing software development unit. Research in a large number of data shows that: video conferencing is mainly flexible and easy to use, mass civilian, home small development 1, flexible and easy to use video conferencing market gradually increasing number of enterprise users, some enterprise CIO often complain that the traditional video conferencing products are too expensive, and to use the leased line or ISDN; software products are very unstable performance, the use of inconvenience, combined with the cumbersome download and installation steps and the bandwidth of the high requirements, has not been able to meet the basic user requirements. Requirements, has been unable to meet the basic needs of users. The user's concern for flexibility and ease of use indicates that the videoconferencing system needs to further simplify the operation and improve compatibility with other systems: most of the videoconferencing systems are controlled by means of hierarchical menus, and the operation is still relatively complicated. Data ****sharing refers to the use of videoconferencing systems to enable collaborators in different locations to understand each other's situation and ****share applications (e.g., electronic whiteboards, ****share Windows applications, etc.). With the development of video, audio, data integrated network, especially in the field of distance learning and telemedicine, users will pay more attention to the data and application *** enjoy; flexibility is also very important to users, in the field of video communications, conference applications are only one part: more and more users want video conferencing system with distance learning and can be combined with the office automation system to improve the quality of management. Quality. Videoconferencing system as a communication network system, system manageability and maintainability is very important. Can be easily loaded and unloaded high-quality system for the need to move and often travel to the user is very important, in the premise of the system does not reduce the performance of the system, improve the portability of the system is extremely necessary. In short, business users need more flexible and easy to use video conferencing system.　　2, the masses of civilians The development of electronic information software industry, so that ordinary users to enjoy high-definition video communications, has not been a distant dream.　　More and more video conferencing systems to improve work efficiency, enhance collaboration, reduce the cost of official advantages so that it is becoming a government departments and industries, the exchange of information, an important means of transmission. Since 2004, many government agencies and large and medium-sized enterprises began to video conferencing system to three, four cities to expand. This development trend is first of all due to the development of broadband network, broadband network is becoming more and more popular, some cities, counties, towns and villages of the network broadband environment has been close to the large-scale central cities, which makes it possible to provide low-cost, high-quality, professional videoconferencing services in the third and fourth level market. At the same time, the rapid progress of e-government and enterprise informatization and some industries, the successful application of video systems in the secondary market is also accelerating the expansion of the video conferencing market to the third and fourth tier cities. Data show that in this civilianization trend driven by the entire video conferencing market in the government office has accounted for 46.6% of the total market share. And in order to improve the operation mode and work efficiency, telecommunication, finance, railroad, electric power and other industries are also vigorously developing videoconferencing systems, and they occupy 33.2% of the market share.　　Compared with the above sectors, China's distance education and telemedicine are still in the early stage of development, with shares of 8.7% and 7.9% respectively. This reflects that videoconferencing systems have not yet been built up enough in the areas of distance education and telemedicine. However, according to our research shows that the application of these two areas in recent years has shown a booming momentum, once again a strong argument for the popularization of video conferencing civilian development trend.　　3, home miniaturization video conferencing system allows users to be located in different places for "face-to-face" like exchanges, which undoubtedly improves efficiency and saves the enterprise meeting expenses to bring a lot of benefits. In the past, the mainstream video conferencing system is a room-style behemoth, they are expensive, has been a large company, the big bosses of the exclusive rights and interests of ordinary businesses it can not be expected. However, with the rapid development of computer technology, computer processing power, network transmission capabilities have improved greatly, video conferencing system to miniaturize, gradually to the extent that it can be accepted by the public, for a time, small and medium-sized enterprises and individual users to become the largest potential stock in the field of video conferencing. How to achieve the same work at home as in the office, how to use video conferencing system on a personal PC without having to use a private network and take up the demand for high bandwidth, to the video conferencing home, miniaturization trend provides a fuse.　　These three trends present a challenge to the major video conferencing manufacturers in the market. With the intensification of mass, miniaturization trend, the market calls for the emergence of a suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, families or individuals daily communication communication tools, this tool should have qq, msn convenient, but also have a strong data collaboration function, and audio and video effects put forward higher requirements. In line with this trend, many manufacturers began to consider professional video conferencing to general chat software transformation, but this chat tool must still maintain a professional video conferencing higher audio and video quality and has the ease of use of instant chat tools

China's video conferencing system market size has expanded year by year, the industry market size of 5.17 billion yuan in 2009, compared with 4.23 billion yuan in 2008, an increase of 22.22%. In 2009, the industry market size reached 5.17 billion yuan, up 22.22% from 4.23 billion yuan in 2008; in 2010, the market size reached 6.63 billion yuan, up 28.24% year-on-year, the largest increase in recent years. Combined with the growth of major companies, the industry's growth rate of about 19% in 2011 and about 10% in 2012, it is speculated that its market size will reach 7.89 billion yuan and 8.76 billion yuan, respectively.

In the future, the use of video conferencing systems will further penetrate into all walks of life. The proportion of Chinese government users using video conferencing has reached about 30%, finance, energy, communications, transportation, health care, education and other key industries and organizations are also increasing the proportion of use, but there is still a huge space for development. Government video conferencing network will cover the townships, finance, telecommunications, energy and other industries will also begin to finer market management, which will drive the faster development of the video conferencing system market has played a great role in promoting.

In contrast, the vast number of small and medium-sized enterprises will be the video conferencing system industry development of new growth points. The number of small and medium-sized legal entities in China exceeds 50 million, accounting for more than 99% of the total number of enterprises. As costs continue to decrease, the enterprise's cost control and operational efficiency requirements continue to improve, the video system will become an important way for small and medium-sized enterprises to solve the above problems. Therefore, the market capacity of video conferencing system for small and medium-sized enterprises will show substantial growth. During the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, the development speed of China's video conferencing system industry will be significantly faster than the "11th Five-Year Plan", and it is expected that by the end of the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, the market size of China's video conferencing systems will reach 22 billion yuan.