Security Applications of Videoconferencing

Videoconferencing has opened up the world to our desktops. Unfortunately, it has also exposed our desktops and networks to things…

Videoconferencing has opened up the world to our desktops. Unfortunately, it has also exposed our desktops and networks to things…

The year was 1964 and visitors to the World’s Fair in New York were witness to a new contraption called the Picturephone, The idea of joining voice and video, (1 frame, every 2 seconds) was first demonstrated in 1956 by AT&T, the telephone company founded by Alexander Graham Bell himself. Now instead of just hearing a disembodied voice at the other end of the line, a caller could see the person as well.

Distance learning can be defined simply as an involvement of students and teachers who are separated by time and space. Distance education first emerged in the nineteenth century, when it was called a correspondence course. Today, distance education commonly refers to the use of videoconferencing technologies as delivery modes.

Videoconferencing is one of the hottest new technologies to come out of the last twenty years of technological growth. If you are unfamiliar with the world of videoconferencing, it is essentially a tool, and an interactive one at that, that uses computing technologies, audio, video, and communications devices to help people collaborate as if they were in the same room with each other, instead of in different locations within a city, different states, different countries, or even different time zones. They can, through this technology, talk to each other in real time while offering all sorts of information, including documentation, data, sounds, and pictures that they have collected.

The technology that makes up a videoconference (also called a videoteleconference or simply VTC) is known as “digital compression of audio and video stream in real time.” The videoconferencing software or hardware that makes the compression happen is referred to as a codec (or sometimes it is called a coder/decoder). Audio modems are used in the line of transmission, which makes full use of plain telephony network (abbreviated to POTS) in a variety of types of applications of low-speed, for example, videotelephony because “they convert the digital pulse to/from analog waves in the audio spectrum range.”

When getting ready to purchase your own, or your companies, first video conferencing software package, consider your PC’s needs.

If you thought that video conferencing is the domain of business tycoons and their minions, you will have to think again. Sure, business deals are made, partnerships are formed, mergers are discussed, and using the video conferencing technology firms new product launches up. Yet, more and more private parties are discovering the wonderful world of video conferencing. As a matter of fact, the technology has already been marketed to private parties for a few decades. Who does not remember the videophone that required two parties to have the same setup and then would display the smiling caller’s face on a screen smaller than the computer screen you are currently looking at?

Whenever you think of successful video conferencing, you quite possibly conjure up images of smoke filled board rooms where cigar smoking tycoons make and break multi-million dollar business deals. Conversely, in the age of political correctness, the smoke filled rooms have probably given way to large and airy rooms where the aroma of mocha lattes is wafting to the ceiling. Nonetheless, video conferencing is almost always associated with business deals. Yet did you know that there are other uses that business may make of video conferencing and its associated technologies?

Video conferencing allows a large or small number of individuals to communicate in real time, no matter where they are located in the world. Via audio and video transmissions, the parties will be able to discuss, conference, and compare charts, graphs, and other items and this combination of visual data with voice interaction and video reality makes this as most useful tool for many business and individuals alike. Yet what exactly are the advantages of video conferencing?

Many technological beginners are impressed at the prospect of videoconferencing but they take much of the technology that makes this…