Metadata For companies and users, Panel at the IMTC 2025 Event:
Moderator – Andrea Basso, AT&T.
Alberto Messina, RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana)
Paolo Dettori, IBM
David Gibbon, AT&T

Watch It here (Playlist) or see the following parts:

Part A

Part B

Part C

Part D

Part E

As a part of the IMTC 2025 event, we invited Alicia Abella from AT&T Labs to talk about Social TV.
Alicia Talked with Kfir Pravda (VP marketing at IMTC) about the future of TV and AT&T own Social TV prototype service – CollaboratTV. Its exiting to see all the commitment from both of the Industry and the academy to Social TV.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the formation of a Telepresence Multi-Streaming Activity Group at IMTC. Telepresence is becoming widely deployed as companies seek a premium user experience while working together across different locations. Several IMTC members, including Cisco, Polycom, Radvision, Lifesize, Tandberg and AT&T have expressed interest in a Telepresence Activity Group and will be actively participating in the AG. The AG will be co-chaired by Allyn Romanow of Cisco and a representative from Polycom.

The charter of the AG will be to define the requirements and use cases to drive standardization efforts by the SDOs (Standards Development Organizations) in the Telepresence Multi-Streaming area. The AG will work closely with its peers in IETF and ITU-T. The kickoff meeting will be during SuperOp in April at Ancona, during the Telepresence Workshop.

The Board of Directors would like to invite all members to actively participate in the kickoff and the AG, as IMTC leads the way in standardizing another emerging technology area.

Shantanu Sarkar
Working Group Chair, Unified Communications
IMTC

How can you create an engaging, interactive, virtual conference, that will keep people interested, even though they are hundreds of miles away? This is the challenge that we at IMTC is facing this year, while planning its annual event.

IMTC’s Annual event is a meeting point of industry experts in the fields of video communication and interoperability. This year we decided to do a full day conference virtually, using available technologies. We are doing it because of three reasons:
1. This is the conference of the future: Though nothing can replace a handshake, virtual conferences are appealing from economic and efficiency perspective

2. This is what we do: IMTC is all about collaboration, unified communication, and content delivery. Virtual conference is best way to practice what we preach. We also would like to support our members by letting them showcase their technology in real life scenarios, and not only in booths and exhibitions.

3. This is the right thing in the current economic climate: With companies cutting their travel budgets, we should, as an industry organization, enable as many people possible to be a part of the experience. Virtual conference is a great solution for those who can’t travel, but still interested in the content or participants of the event. Also, in times when companies invest a lot in order to reduce their carbon footprint, virtual events are the way to go to help our planet a bit.

So what is the biggest challenge?

For me, the biggest challenge is not technical, but the experience :How can we prevent the conference from turning into a string of webinars or a list of audio presentations?How can we encourage people in the “audience” to interact with speakers and with each other?What should be the role of social platforms in the event?And how to make an extraordinary event, that pushes the boundaries of virtual conferences, with a shoe string budget?
Luckily, I am a part of a great team that is trying to make this project a reality, including Anatoli Levine from Radvision, Andrea Basso from AT&T, Shantanu Sarkar from Cisco, and many other volunteers.
Want to be a part of the effort to create the conference of the future? have  a relevant technology? Consider this as an open call for the industry and drop me an email at kfir AT Pravdam DOT com