New Polycom gear makes high-res video endpoints cheaper

Polycom took the latest step to make videoconferencing more widely available, announcing a new high-resolution videoconferencing system that can use relatively low bandwidth and is expected to be retail-priced between $3,000 and $4,000. The new Polycom QDX 6000 is aimed at small to mid-sized businesses and teleworkers in knowledge industries, according to Joan Vandermate, vice president of marketing for Polycom’s video solutions group.

Last week, videoconferencing competitor Tandberg announced a new lower price point for its telepresence gear. As videoconferencing continues to mature, equipment vendors are making systems less expensive, a move that can make it easier for service providers to bundle video gear as part of a unified communications offer that lets businesses be more productive and reduce costly business travel.

“This is intended to make high-resolution conferencing more affordable for a wider base of users,” Vandermate said. “Our service provider customers have been very interested in selling into these markets, but the end points have been pricey.”

Many small businesses are interested in more cost-effective conferencing and collaboration, Vandermate said, and specific segments are particularly interested, including the education market, healthcare organizations, law firms and consulting companies.

The Polycom QDX 6000 works over bandwidth as low as 256 kilobits per second and is standards-based, so it can interoperate with existing systems. The Polycom QDX 6000 is a plug-and-play system, intended to be easy to install and use and features Polycom’s Lost Packet Recovery technology that optimizes video quality over IP networks. In a standard configuration, the Polycom QDX 6000 configuration includes a high-resolution full-motion pan/tilt/zoom camera with 12x zoom capabilities and supports DVD-quality, high-resolution video at 30 frames per second. The Polycom QDX 6000 includes the ability to make sharing of multi-media content easier.

A number of service providers including smaller ISPs and managed applications providers have expressed interest in this kind of system, Vandermate said. “Our larger channel partners have not been the ones who are most interested. The ones who are closer are the ISPs and ASPs who are providing SIP-based hosted services, bundling Polycom SIP phones and softswitches. They have approached us and said it would be nice to expand SIP-based IP Centrex service to include video. We are moving forward with that. All of our end points are capable of running a SIP stack – currently they will run either H.323 or SIP, and we will offer a dual stack at some point. And this new end point will be very interesting to these service providers.”