by Bob Romano, Vice President of Video Marketing at Avaya
Video conferencing got a tremendous boost when soft clients on mobile devices, laptops and PCs made it more accessible to more employees. Simplicity of use and integration with other common applications made it possible to have full, multimedia communications available through one or two clicks.
At Avaya, we’re now averaging more than 65,000 video meetings per month involving more than 250,000 participants. Employees, customers, partners and suppliers have become so acclimated to the rich collaboration experience of using video meetings that they often tell us that something feels missing in audio-only conferences.
That said, there’s still room for ease-of-use improvements, to better allow discussions and information-sharing to flow naturally.
It is our firm belief that the best technology is that which is invisible–that doesn’t create barriers to achieving deeper relationships, greater understanding and higher levels of productivity. We spend a lot of time examining the user experience and how we can improve it.
As heavy users of video conferencing, Avaya has been our own best subject. The new and enhanced capabilities we’ve incorporated into our team engagement portfolio and Avaya Scopia video reflect this study and our effort. For a flavor of what you can get now, here are five of the new capabilities you can look for with Avaya Scopia video:
- Wireless Presentation
We’ve all been there: It’s your turn to present your slides in the conference room. You first have to find the wires to connect your laptop to the video conferencing system–often, you need to pull it out of your colleague’s laptop who just presented–test that it projects on the display and to the other participants, and hope for the best.
Avaya Scopia users now have the ability to wirelessly present from their laptop–either PC or Mac–with Avaya Screen Link.
Just enter a conference room that has a Scopia room system and your laptop will automatically pair with the system using sonic recognition technology.
Anyone can present in a video meeting directly from their laptop without the need to find and plug in clumsy wires, configure their PC’s video output resolution, and fumble with the proper video out key sequence on their PC. Simply walk into a Scopia-enabled video meeting room, and your presentation can be transmitted wirelessly from your desktop to the Scopia room system.
Oh, and this capability exists whether you are in a video conference or not. Think of the value of being able to use high-resolution displays to show content in a conference room–to either the people sitting in the room with you or to everyone on a video call. Simple. And pretty cool.
- Mobile Meeting Continuity
Here’s another all-too-common video conferencing scenario: It’s your first meeting of the day, so you dial in on your smartphone while driving to the office. When you arrive at the conference room, you have to get off the call on your smartphone, search for the dial-in information and manually connect to the same meeting using the room system.
With Avaya Mobile Link, your mobile device automatically pairs and transfers the meeting to the Scopia room system, allowing you to enjoy the room system’s crystal-clear audio, HD camera and large display.
- Full HD at the Desktop
Avaya prides itself on a ‘mobile first’ design, providing solutions that ensure the highest degree of collaboration and engagement to connect a growingly dispersed and global work team regardless of their location.
We’ve simplified and enhanced BYOD complexity. Using the smart protocols already built into Scopia, people on their laptops, PC tablets, and desktops can participate with full 1080p HD video. That quality was previously only available on room systems.
This delivers an exceptional conferencing experience and enables a very natural and highly productive virtual meeting.
- Asset Creation
Recording video meetings can be really helpful, particularly for people who weren’t able to attend the meeting live.
We’ve dramatically enhanced our streaming and recording capabilities, to enable users toeasily broadcast video meetings to larger audiences and to record in full HD video.
This allows the meeting host to create valuable assets for future reference after the video meeting. Finding and playing back that recorded session is simple and intuitive. If you’ve used YouTube, you will know how to use our new playback system.
- Extreme Network Efficiency
The new Scopia XT7100, our high-end, flagship room system, now incorporates H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (or HEVC), the industry’s most advanced video compression technology available today.
One of the big benefits of H.265 is that it doubles the video compression efficiency currently available. Our customers can now enjoy full HD video with half the bandwidth required. That’s on top of our Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology, designed for error resiliency on networks that experience packet loss, such as the public Internet.
Enhancements like these come straight from customer and partner input, along with our own experience using Scopia. Everything we’re announcing today is designed to help our customers ensure that the video conferencing experience is about the objectives of the meeting and not about the tools to make it happen.
