While video conferencing has started from the ground up as an interoperable solution, telepresence hasn’t. The high end of the high end visual communication systems just don’t play well with the rest of the industry – different products from different vendors can’t really communicate with each other. For a highly expensive system, this limitation of interoperability isn’t a simple one. But now times are changing, and two recent announcements are making it clear that telepresence is becoming interoperable at long last:

1. Cisco, the company pushing telepresence the most, recently released their Telepresence Interoperability Protocol – TIP. Hopefully, this will soon get standardized in the ITU or some other organization.

2. The IMTC just started a new activity group for telepresence.

The focus of these initiatives is making sure that the use of telepresence with multiple monitors (the standard practice these days) will actually work when it comes to interoperability. It requires dialing out calls, coupling media streams and being able to explain and understand the layout of remote room systems and the number of codecs/seats/monitors they have.

So here’s my TIP:

· If you’re interested in telepresence, make sure to join the IMTC’s new activity group.

· If you want to know how telepresence might look in the future – start reading science fiction books.