User:Syouwiki/Video Exchange Draft

A Video Exchange is a service which enables real-time video communications between video endpoints on separate, disconnected networks. The emerging role of the video exchange in today's video communications industry is two-fold:


 * 1) To serve as a secure "bridge" between network "islands" that provides the means for video communications between the different networks. This function includes solving the various incompatibilities that may exist between the networks.
 * 2) To provide higher-level video communications services such as call routing, scheduling, and multipoint conferencing to the customers on the attached networks.

It is expected that the role of the video exchange will continue to evolve as the real-time video communications industry matures.

Background
Video conferencing has been widely available outside of research labs for over two decades, but it is really only in the last few years that the technology has improved to the point where a large majority of potential users can see major benefits of adoption. This is due to a "perfect storm" of factors that have lined up to make properly implemented video conferencing a compelling experience for the average user. These factors include:


 * 1) Wide availability of high-bandwidth IP networks for transport.
 * 2) Wide availability and adoption of high-definition video in the consumer electronics market.
 * 3) Increased demand for (and therefore availability of) video DSPs (digital signal processors), which are used to convert video images into IP packets.
 * 4) Increased hassles and inefficiencies involved with airline travel.
 * 5) Globalization creating more geographically distributed teams at major multinational corporations, as well as more partnerships between organizations in different geographic regions.
 * 6) Introduction of "immersive" video conferencing technologies.

An essential enabler of this perfect storm is high definition (HD) video. HD video solves some of the biggest challenges to adoption of standard definition (SD) video conferencing, particularly what is often termed in the industry as "meeting fatigue". This is because the SD video conferencing image quality is hard on viewer's eyes and cannot trick the brain into the illusion that video participants are in the same room as the viewer - it is typically not possible to even see the whites of a person's eyes in a SD video conferencing session. HD video provides incredibly clear and lifelike images and greatly decreases meeting fatigue as a result. The increasing adoption of HD video also enabled the immersive line of products now being implemented in multinational corporations across the globe. Right now these immersive solutions are expensive and only practical for large companies with a significant return on investment on travel avoidance or productivity gains by linking remote teams, however as the costs of production of these technologies goes down the market for high quality video conferencing will open up to more and more people.

Even as HD video presented new opportunities to the video conferencing industry it also presented new challenges. Perhaps most significant of these is the migration away from ISDN as the transport network of choice to IP. ISDN is not capable of delivering the level of service required for high quality HD video; bandwidth is more limited and end-to-end latency is usually bordering unacceptable. In addition, ISDN does not have a global reach like IP networks do thanks to the global adoption of the Internet and the spread of MPLS networks for private corporate data communications. This started a paradigm shift in the video conferencing industry that is underway to this day; the move to IP networks for transport was (and is) a major disruption to traditional video conferencing service models. In addition, the increased adoption rates have created new opportunities and new challenges that the market is still sorting out. The most fundamental of these is how to transition from a transport medium that was essentially offering any-to-any connectivity with a predictable level of service (even though it was generally no better than "fair") to a transport that either provides any-to-any connectivity with no quality of service guarantees (the Internet) or provides quality of service guarantees without any-to-any connectivity (private MPLS networks). Video exchange services are designed to meet these challenges and are the most recent step in an evolution to a global video communications network.

Brief History of the Video Exchange
The concept of the video exchange has been around much longer than the term has been in use. Previous to about 2008 the providers offering services that we would today call a video exchange were few in number and the industry was very much in the early adopter stage, where it had stayed for years due to the low adoption rates of standard-definition video conferencing. At this time there was no one term for this service, but probably the most used and descriptive was "video bridging service". The primary function of a video bridging service is to provide video services (such as multipoint conferencing, scheduling, and user support) for a customer organization's internal video conferencing needs as a managed service. The ability for users to call outside of their organization is something that could be easily offered with ISDN, but it is not widely used beyond a core group of adopters due to the low adoption rates in the general populace and generally poor quality of the sessions. As SD video conferencing started to move to an IP transport the Internet became available for calls between different organizations, but again the low adoption rates and the inability to control the quality kept video conferencing from being adopted widely as a communications tool. However, these video bridging services did offer the ability to connect different organizations to each other from their own private networks and so by definition we could today describe them as video exchange services.

Through most of the first decade of the new millennium video bridging services companies remained relatively small and relied on competing for the core group of video conferencing adopters. This core group was experiencing small amounts of growth every year, but it was hardly enough to provide strong commercial incentives for large service providers to do more than dabble with the technology. The video endpoint market was dominated by just two companies, Polycom and TANDBERG, and though there were incremental improvements to the technology the industry in general seemed to be trying to figure out how to make the transition from ISDN to IP. But just as there was little motivation for many players in the voice market to move from TDM voice to VoIP, so with SD video there was not a pressing need to move to IP; ISDN was able to provide a predictable experience without the investments and disruptions required to move the technology to IP. Though as HD video technology became more widespread speculation started in the industry that HD video conferencing would be the technology that would finally kill ISDN.

In 2006 two major technology companies entered the video conferencing industry, creating the first major disruption of the HD era; HP with its product called Halo and Cisco Systems with its product called TelePresence. Both products were designed to be "immersive" video conferencing experiences. That is, the experience in an immersive environment is designed to present the illusion that all participants are actually in the same meeting room. Both products were compelling for global organizations seeking productivity gains for their workers and quality of life improvements for their traveling executives. Many early adopters began global deployments. As such, this new market segment created a new and positive awareness of video conferencing at the very top of the most powerful corporations in the world.

HP Halo was a product not only delivered with hardware, but included an entire managed service "wrap" as well, and a fundamental part of that service was the Halo Video Exchange Network (HVEN). This appears to be the first usage of the term "Video Exchange" in a company's product name, but more were to follow. HVEN was designed not only to connect Halo sites within a company, but also Halo sites between companies. However, because HVEN was really a single network solely managed by HP it does not really meet the definition of video exchange as it is evolving in the industry today; one fundamental characteristic of a video exchange is that it can connect disparate networks.

From the beginning of their entry into the market Cisco had made clear that they felt their product could not really take off without addressing the ability to call between organizations, or what at that time was called "Business to Business" calling. Due to the amount of bandwidth required (about 16 Mbps for a three-screen system) and the fact that high compression rates required a network engineered for quality of service, neither the Internet nor ISDN could provide transport for TelePresence traffic and hope to maintain the quality of the immersive experience. Only private networks (usually MPLS) engineered for quality of service could provide the transport required, and the problem that had to be solved was how to connect the islands of private networks to each other and still provide the rigorous network quality required for a good user experience. As a result Cisco (apparently independent from what the traditional video conferencing industry was already doing at the time) came up with the concept of an "exchange" service that could act as a connecting point for different networks to exchange TelePresence traffic with each other. Unlike Halo, however, Cisco was not in a position to build their own network similar to HVEN. Cisco already had a large ecosystem of service provider customer and partners, some of whom were beginning to explore offering such services themselves, and for Cisco to do so as well could well be seen as a conflict of interest. (While it is doubtless that Cisco's 2007 acquisition of WebEx made this a tempting "market adjacency" for them they appear to have decided to let the service providers have the market to themsleves.)

Two of those partners were Wire One Communications and BT. Wire One was one of the largest and most successful of the video bridging service providers as well as consistently ranking in the lists of Polycom and TANDBERG as a top hardware reseller. In the world of video conferencing services Wire One was big, though to be big in a market estimated at about $400 million was still quite small compared to most communications companies. Wire One had embraced Cisco TelePresence and quickly become Cisco's top reseller for the product, which was coupled to Wire One's managed services to provide a similar suite of products to what HP offered with Halo. Wire One saw a TelePresence exchange as little different to their core business as a video bridging service provider. BT. for their part, was the first MPLS network to receive Cisco's TelePresence network certification. Though BT did not have much of a presence in the video conferencing services market they saw the promise of TelePresence to drive bandwidth revenue and they decided to develop an exchange service to assist with that end.

In late 2008 BT Conferencing