More clout for the copper, Alliance offers telcos a full-motion video clip service >BY SHIRA McCARTHY, Associate Editor-News

At a time when telcos are trying hard to make the most of what they have, a new alliance in the videoconferencing industry could give carriers a way to stretch copper resources by adding distribution and video archiving to their business service offerings.

By integrating its VL2000 videoconferencing product with Danver, Mass.-based Opera Systems' video storage server and indexing system, VideoLan Technologies has paved the way for telcos to provide on-demand delivery of full-motion video clips to the desktop. "If you have only one service that you offer on your network, you're not going to make a lot of money," said Peter Beck, corporate vice president of market development at Louisville, Ky.-based VideoLan. "Videoconferencing alone as an application for a desktop system is not sufficient to get video telecommunications rolling. But when we start adding other characteristics such as video distribution from an archive, the combined value becomes particularly compelling."

One possible offering could be an archived broadcast news service, in which news clips are stored on a video storage server. The consumer would use Opera's indexing software to call up a certain video clip, which the telco would deliver to the desktop over twisted pair using VideoLan's proprietary transmission technology, Metallic-Fiber.

The VL2000, VideoLan's flagship product, is a fully integrated local and wide area network videoconferencing system that can deliver NTSC full-motion video and data at 57.6 kb/s as well as two channels of full-spectrum audio over twisted pair.