The video future: Sophisticated visual services platforms come of age and promise to unleash the potential of multimedia

>From telegraph to telephone, the history of telecommunications is a story of progress. The next chapter is destined to have as much of an impact on society as the telephone had in the first part of the 20th century, and it presents carriers with similar revenue opportunities.

Visual communication services with significantly higher quality and versatility than room-based videoconferencing are emerging. As these services become available for widespread business and leisure use, market analysts predict that annual revenue will grow dramatically-at least 250% by 2002-to $30 billion.

As competition speeds visual communication services to end users, service providers such as telcos, cable TV companies, interexchange carriers, competitive local exchange carriers and information systems departments will look for reliable, comprehensive, state-of-the-art and cost-effective visual services platforms (Figure 1).

Everyone knows that any business meeting often employs a variety of media. For example, ideas can be illustrated via photographs, graphics, video clips, animation, tables or charts. Computers, white boards and paper help facilitate discussion. The results are captured and stored for further work or to be passed on to colleagues. Visual communication services come into play by facilitating these interactions across a telecom network. They enable people to talk to each other face-to-face while accessing, presenting, sharing and modifying visual information and computer applications in many different media formats-with the technology becoming transparent to the user.

Now visual communication services are poised for proliferation as new advances eliminate the final technological and market obstacles.

Video compression and PC technology are continuing on a steep cost reduction curve, leading to a PC card codec within two years. Codecs that reside on motherboards will be available within three years, and a software codec will follow shortly thereafter.

Cameras will become smaller and fully digital with built-in codecs. Display technology will evolve to provide large, flat-panel screens that users can hang on a wall or embed in the desktop.

In addition, the transport layer is gaining speed, whether it's asynchronous transfer mode, Sonet, dense wavelength division multiplexing, ISDN or frame relay. The Layer 3 network likely will adopt some flavor of Internet protocol (IP) with the ability to handle multimedia, multipoint capabilities and guaranteed quality of service. This will open the door for fully interactive services based on the Internet model but with the attributes required for effective visual communications.

Finally, visual services platforms are coming of age: They are managed, controlled, interactive, on-demand, Web-based and user-friendly. The deployment of sophisticated platforms-specifically designed to manage and control visual communication services and equipment across any transport layer-will at last unleash the potential of visual communication applications (Figure 2).

Best of the Internet and telephone network The Internet is an early model of the next generation of visual communications. But just as it is characterized by multimedia, hypermedia, distributed information, operating system independence and open end user participation, the Internet is also plagued by slow response, unreliable operation, questionable security, frequent congestion and difficult setup. The telephone network is reliable, secure, highly available, easy-to-use, fully managed and billable. But it also has low bandwidth and is ill-suited for multimedia.

The ideal solution, then, combines the organization and simplicity of the telephone system with the multimedia and open nature of the Internet. This is the basis of a visual services platform.

A high-quality platform will provide reliable, secure, manageable, controlled and billable services, independent of the transport network or user access.Developers will design an effective platform through a control and management system, HTML/Java-based interface, and a gateway interworking device. These do not yet exist in the marketplace but will appear within two years.

The control and management system provides the offerings that service providers and end users require for successful visual communications.

For the service provider, the system provides the ability to configure, operate, maintain and bill visual communication services. It is designed to manage and control sessions composed of multiple media streams that arrive from multiple sources, which are headed for multiple destinations and can be transparently added and dropped throughout the session. A control and management system also guarantees a reliable, available, flexible and secure services system that will give service providers the hardened attributes they need to offer managed and controlled services to mainstream business and home users.

For the customer, the system provides directory, calling, conference, mail and message services, as well as customer service management capabilities, all through a Web interface. It provides access and control for other familiar Internet information retrieval services. All services are access- and transport-independent and can be offered either by the service provider or by third-party providers. The customer's service profile is portable and automatically accessed wherever the user connects to the network.

The Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium is currently developing standards for the control and management system that would provide a common definition for worldwide visual services platforms (Figure 3).

One handy device The gateway interworking device makes the services available, regardless of the network, access device or codec employed. This device may be placed anywhere in the network, is managed by the control and management system and interfaces one network with another by transcoding among different codec types.

The device provides transport-layer transparency among asynchronous transfer mode, ISDN, frame relay, Sonet, digital subscriber line and time division multiplexed networks, as well as H.320, H.323, H.324 and H.310 terminal types. Enhanced IP provides network-layer transparency, and the control and management system provides service-layer transparency.

Of prime importance to customers, the device accommodates the various legacy systems already in place, allowing users to migrate as their particular needs and economics dictate.

The visual services platform provides three critical attributes enabling service providers to expand the breadth and depth of their offerings:

* System stability, reliability and security

* Network, access and location transparency, and

* Market demand for high-quality visual communications.

First, because of the system's stability, reliability and security, end users will likely regard the visual services platform as they do today's phone system-a familiar, dependable part of their everyday lives. This is essential to moving visual communications from the specialty realm to mainstream service.

Second, because the services and user profiles are transparent to network access and location, end users will be able to learn it quickly. It will create a universal service capability that customizes itself to each user.

Third, the market is primed to embrace visual communications that collapse the rich set of voice, IP and video into a single robust entity. Existing voice services such as basic calling, call transfer, camp-on, add, drop and hold will be bundled with more complex functions such as messaging, three-way conferencing, multiparty conferencing, add-to-conference and drop-from-conference. E-mail and Internet-style services such as browsing, information retrieval, chat groups and information broadcast will be part of the service offerings, as will video- and audio-on-demand, pay TV and information kiosks.

The revenue opportunities are enormous. The potential deployment scenario extends well beyond today's community of 200 million PCs to the full expanse of th e switched telephone network: 1 billion users. Successful service providers will have the vision and fortitude to invest in pilots and trials today that lead to widespread deployment and new revenue streams tomorrow.