Vidyo's Personal Telepresence Room System Costs Less than $7,000

Low latency of 140ms, Telepresence grade video over the public Internet and flexible data sharing are just a few of the features built into Vidyo's first telepresence room system based on the Intel Core i7 processing platform. Dubbed the VidyoRoom HD-220, the solution combines the standard x86 hardware with a software-based approach, which enables a substantial investment protection while offering advanced capabilities, such as the support for two 1080p video streams.

“Vidyo has built its entire product line upon the Intel Architecture processors so they are able to take advantage of our faster, intelligent multi-core technology to deliver outstanding video conferencing performance to their customers,” Elliot Garbus, vice president Intel Software and Services Group, and general manager of Intel’s Visual Computing Software Division, said. “Vidyo demonstrates how building on Intel Architecture processors translates rapidly into improved performance as Intel releases new processors.”

The VidyoRoom HD-220 is powered by the H.264 SVC technology and uses the patented VidyoRouter architecture. It is this architecture that provides the out-of-the-box dual screen 720p support at 60 frames per second (or the aforementioned 1080p at 30 fps). While this is quite interesting in itself, it is the means used in the video streaming that is the true asset of this telepresence solution. The VidyoRoom can deliver a high quality over “commoditized networks without any managed services,” which “represents a significant cost savings for Vidyo’s customers.” In addition to this, it can easily connect to other VidyoRoom and VidyoDesktop clients and even includes free software upgrade to 1080p encode (1Q10).

“Vidyo is the only company providing a software-based personal telepresence solution that extends from room systems to desktops including laptops, Net books, and soon smart phones over standard broadband Internet or 3G or 4G networks, with no proprietary hardware,” Ofer Shapiro, CEO of Vidyo, added. “Vidyo’s patented architecture eliminates the multipoint conferencing unit ('MCU') from the core of the system delivering on the promise of natural face-to-face communications. The HD-220, like our entire product line, delivers personal telepresence consistently over the Internet with less than half the end-to-end latency of MCU-based solutions to maximize real-time collaborative experiences.”

“We believe Vidyo’s approach to videoconferencing could significantly alter the economics of the industry,” Rohit Chopra, communications analyst at Wedbush Securities, shared. “Furthermore, we think Vidyo has lower total cost of ownership as the technology does not require dedicated networks and bandwidth, thus allowing customers to build videoconferencing capabilities on top of their existing infrastructure.”

The VidyoRoom HD-220 is available at the price of $6,995.