Cisco's telepresence undercut

With today's online-based telepresence solutions, Cisco's high quality telepresence solutions are under fire from new entrants.

In the current market there are three main categories of video conferencing. There are free but low quality solutions like Skype; traditional video conferencing with a meeting room camera, of medium quality, high latency, typically no eye contact (because it shows the entire board room) and immersive solutions that offer high quality, eye contact, but are incredibly expensive (US $150k - $300k setup and $300-400 per hour).

Telepresence solutions company Vidyo says the options for medium and large-sized businesses are either inferior products or solutions that are so expensive their IT department needed to charge back the costs to divisions when used.

Vidyo aims to compete with Cisco’s high quality telepresence and we were recently shown how the company offers an immersive telepresence experience for a set-up of only a few hundred US dollars for the desktop software and only a few dollars an hour for the service.

The company told us that support from Vidyo is already available for Windows and Mac using basic HD cameras, plus Android and Moblin-based smart phones. iPhone support is said to be on its way.

The small company said it was having a particularly expansive year, looking to double its revenue in 2010, with a third of its business coming from the Asia Pacific region. You can find more information about Vidyo here.