November 30, 1999 Web posted at: 10:24 a.m. EST (1524 GMT) by Jason Meserve

From...

(IDG) -- People have been waiting for videoconferencing to hit the mainstream since the first video phone was introduced by AT&T many moons ago. Today, product vendors and service providers are turning to the Web to ease the barriers to using videoconferencing on an everyday basis.

Vendors and service providers are leaning on the Web to simplify the scheduling of videoconferences, even to the point at which human conference operators won't be needed. The offerings are also designed to shield customers from equipment incompatibility issues, so it won't matter to the customers that they and the companies they are conferencing with use different video gear.

In addition, Web-based offerings can add streaming, data collaboration and other services that might be daunting for enterprises to set up and manage in-house.

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Vialog in Andover, Mass., and V-Span in King of Prussia, Pa., are among the companies offering Web-based videoconferencing reservation systems.

Customers can log on to Vialog's www.webconferencing.com to list members of a videoconference and to schedule a conference call. The customer can choose to have all parties dial in to the conference, as is typical of most conferences today, or perhaps more conveniently, Vialog can dial out to connect all parties to the conference. V-Span offers similar reservation services.

"Because we buy our communications service in bulk, we can often dial out cheaper than a user can dial in to our operations center," says Josh Cartagenova, marketing manager at V-Span.

As an added benefit, V-Span can record conferences for future playback and offers data collaboration services for those who want participants to edit documents and files while conferencing.

Both companies help customers overcome problems related to using different videoconferencing gear. Videoconferencing is never as easy as dial and connect. There are systems based on H.323 (IP), H.320 (ISDN) and H.321 (ATM) that all run different compression algorithms and work at different speeds.

Service providers such as Vialog and V-Span have Multipoint Control Units (MCU), bridges and gateways on hand to link video gear based on different technologies.

The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently held a videoconference among 20 sites to discuss how its members' residents can manage their graduate school debts. Meeting coordinator Kirsten Bianchi says Vialog's service made it easy to set up the meeting.

"We just gave each site a list of equipment requirements [to make sure their equipment would work with Vialog's], and Vialog handled the rest," says Bianchi, who notes that part of Vialog's service is to make sure each site is "certified" before connecting it. "It's great because our users could either call in or use the Web site to get certified," she says.

While the AAMC has only used videoconferencing twice to hold meetings, it will now start looking at the technology as a more viable option. "Videoconferencing over ISDN is a lot cheaper than travel," Bianchi says.

Andrew Davis, managing partner at Wainhouse Consulting Group in Brookline, Mass., says Web-based videoconferencing services lower the barrier to entry. "Some large users see [setting up videoconferences] as being hard and will welcome farming it out to an expert," he says.

Service providers such as Vialog and V-Span have yet to eliminate human operators to set up conferences. But FVC.com, a Santa Clara hardware, software and services company, has technology in the works designed to let service providers fully automate videoconferences.

The company's Video Portal offering, currently in beta testing and set for delivery early next year, relies on a Web site to tie together back-end conferencing systems, including MCUs and bridges.

The Web site is similar to MyYahoo in that it gives users their own pages for storing contact names and setting up conferences. Users will be able to click on a set of names and click a button to launch a conference. FVC.com's equipment will support the connections to participants.

FVC.com will offer the Video Portal as a service to carriers or sell all the hardware and software components to service providers that want to bring the technology into their own operations centers.

However, Wainhouse's Davis says it still will be a while before completely automated videoconferencing goes mainstream. "But it is a good sign that a couple of companies are starting to chase the golden ring," he says.