Today, increased bandwidth and affordable cloud-based services give even the smallest businesses and educational facilities the ability to offer on-demand content, real-time collaboration, and streaming media.
There are many advantages—increased productivity, reduced costs, and new business opportunities, to name a few—to high-quality audio visual (AV) capabilities such as video conferencing, lecture capture, conference calls, and web meetings. Traditionally, each of these AV capabilities is considered a specific application, requiring a separate appliance-based solution. For example, video conferencing requires a video codec, lecture capture requires a recording system, audio conferencing requires a conference phone, and web meetings need a PC with a web camera.
The challenges to appliance-based and often proprietary solutions are many. First, the financial investment to purchase these separate systems puts the full array of AV meeting tools out of reach for most small- to mid-sized businesses and educational facilities. Second, supporting and maintaining disparate, nonintegrated systems is an IT nightmare. Finally, since it isn’t practical to outfit a single room with all the equipment required to accommodate every conceivable AV usage scenario, multiple rooms need to be available.
In this white paper, we’ll discuss how to provide a simple and affordable solution to these challenges using a device that is already in most meeting rooms—the PC.