telepresence interoperability protocol

Polycom & TIP

February 23, 2011 By IMTC 1 Comment

A few days ago, Polycom announced support for the Cisco/IMTC - Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) standard.
The Telepresence Interoperability Protocol was developed by Cisco to allow multi-screen interoperability between Telepresence systems from different vendors. The protocol was transferred to IMTC for on-going development and is offered in a royalty-free license.

The announcement was promoted in PR channels of both Polycom and Cisco, a rather unique sight:

David Benham, IMTC TIP Activity Group Co-Chair responded to the announcement, indicating the importance of the protocol to the industry:
“We are pleased to hear that Polycom is joining other companies in adopting the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP), the only open, multi-screen interoperability protocol available today. In mid 2010, Cisco transferred ownership of TIP to IMTC so it can provide stewardship of the protocol, offer TIP royalty-free to anyone as well as manage the TIP open source project. We look forward to Polycom implementing TIP, which helps improve overall market acceptance of Telepresence systems and services.”

TIP support will allow Polycom Telepresence equipment to participate in a HD video-conference with Cisco products. Polycom UC Intelligent Core MCU will support Cisco’s TIP from Q2 2011.
Polycom isn’t the first Company outside Cisco to support TIP – The protocol is licensed by many companies including Radvision, LifeSize (Logitech) and Tandberg (now a part of Cisco).

For more info about TIP, check our TIP Page.

About the writer: IMTC

Filed Under: IMTC News, Interoperability, Technology insight, Telepresence, TIP Tagged With: Cisco Systems, Interoperability, Polycom, Telepresence, telepresence interoperability protocol, TIP

David Benham from Cisco on “What is TIP?”

August 16, 2010 By David Benham Leave a Comment

What is this Thumb, Index, Pinky (TIP) thing?

Actually, no, TIP stands for the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol. But the positional relationship of the one’s thumb, index and pinky fingers makes for a useful analogy to describe one of the key design goals of the TIP protocol.

While there are several standards for robust multimedia conferencing, such SIP, RTP, H.264, H.323, none of have yet dealt with the special challenges of preserving the experience in a conference consisting of many multi-screen endpoints as well as a mix of multi-screen and single-screen endpoints.
In other words, without additional mechanisms, receiving endpoints would only know they received three fingers. They wouldn’t know how to arrange them in a way that you would recognize as a hand, with the thumb, index and pinky fingers in their proper place on the receiving end.
Preserving those “in-person” positional relationships in a multi-point conference, with other video and audio streams (or other fingers in my analogy) switching in and out quickly from multiple single screen and multi-screen endpoints, is an important goal for any immersive Telepresence system.

TIP does this and a whole bunch more to help enable interoperability between today’s Telepresence systems, but I am going to need some different analogies to continue. While I am working on those, please see this informative presentation about TIP.

David Benham
Director of Engineering
TelePresence Technology Group
Cisco Systems

About the writer: David Benham

Filed Under: IMTC News, Interoperability, Telepresence Tagged With: Business Services, Cisco Systems, H.323, Session Initiation Protocol, telepresence interoperability protocol, Videoconferencing

Presentation – Cisco TIP Telepresence protocol in the SuperOP2010 Event

July 15, 2010 By Anatoli Levine Leave a Comment

Allyn Romanow from Cisco‘s TSBU (Telepresence Systems Business Unit) talked about the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol at the IMTC SuperOp 2010 Workshop. This is her presentation:

Cisco TIP Presentation

View more presentations from IMTC.