Home Telepresence Report

Home Telepresence – What’s all the fuss?
Telepresence, as stated in our “What is Telepresence” post, is all about an immersive experience. And while video-conferencing isn’t new, creating an immersive experience is rather expensive and until today was out of the reach of the home user.

A typical environment for Telepresence Solutions

As the market moves to high-definition TV displays, broadband Internet speeds and powerful computer devices – creating this experience cheaply at home finally becomes a reality.

The term “Home Telepresence” is new, and was coined de-facto by the first one to introduce a high-quality video conferencing device aimed specifically for the home user – Cisco.

Home Telepresence by Cisco

Home Telepresence Options:
Today Cisco announced its home Telepresence product - ūmi (Pronounced yoo-me). ūmi is a pan-tilt camera that sits on top of the HDTV and set-top box system that connects to the television with a HDMI cable and allows for 1080P video conferencing.
Earlier in its CES demonstration, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that Cisco approach is device agnostic -
This hints that we might see Umi connectivity to other devices in the future. Cisco will charge 599$ for the hardware and a monthly subscription fee of 24.99$.
ūmi will ship at November 11th and is available for pre-order, Verizon will be the first to offer it to FiOS customers in 2011 although pricing details are unknown yet.

If Cisco’s Home Telepresence technology is indeed device agnostic, we might turn up to see it at running on devices like the Cisco Cius and maybe even on the new BlackBerry PlayBook (which includes a front-facing camera). Cisco said it’s looking into Facetime integration as well but it’s remains to be seen if Skype interoperability, a thing many consumers might be interested in, will actually happen. It’s worth mentioning that Skype just recently appointed Cisco’s head of enterprise, commercial and SMB unit as their CEO – and are looking for ways to expand. Recent TV models by major manufactures like Samsung and Panasonic are Skype enabled and allow for a Video Calling, although not in the same quality as the Cisco Umi or corporate video-conferencing systems.

The second big announcement made today, was by Logitech -
Logitech (Which bought LifeSize, a Telepresence company back in 2009) announced its Logitech Revue.
The Revue is a 299$, multi-purpose multimedia device based on the Google TV platform.
Revue offers movies, surfing abilities, and since it’s based on the Android platform – Adobe Flash and custom applications support.
Coming from Logitech, it’s almost no-brainer that they also added a video-conferencing capability in it with the addition of a 149$ camera called Logitech TV Cam.
At 448$ Total with the Revue itself – It’s not a cheap way of home video conferencing, but it’s a living-room experience and that’s different than using a software client on a desktop computer.

Is Home Telepresence really needed?
Both Revue and Umi are somewhat of a premium form of home video-conferencing as they require two things – buying a new device (unlike, using skype on a common laptop, for example) and a high speed broadband connection – The Revue use 1mbps (both upload and download) for 720P conferencing, and the Umi use 1.5mbps for 720P and 3.5mbps for 1080P. The bandwidth requirements makes the Home Telepresence solutions quite exclusive, and the Umialso requires a subscription fee of 25$ a month in addition to that – a 300$ yearly extra over the device cost itself. Will consumers be willing to pay the extra 149$ over the base price of the Revue or the more expensive costs of the Cisco Umi?

From our experience with Telepresence – seeing is believing.
The Home Telepresence experience is undoubtedly better than using a laptop with a software client but unless people get to actually see how good it is – the adaptation rate might be slow.

Can Home Telepresence win over cheaper video-chatting solutions?
For that to happen, some sort of a glue is needed. Many look at Apple as a possible “savior”, by opening a protocol such as Facetime, thus promoting unified communication between all sort of video enabled devices – Tablets, Cellular Phones, Set-Top boxes and professional Telepresence equipment. By creating a world of products that speaks in the same language, and enabling communication withmobile devices, users might see the overall benefit of living “inside” that eco-system.

So now more than ever, it make sense to ask – Apple, where are you?