By Michael Oliver -
Back at it again revisiting our remote video setup. ?We use video conferencing in three areas. ?
1) person to person meetings (discussing expanding this to every artist workstation to allow them to video chat with remote facilities as we are collaborating more and more inter-facility)
2) management meetings between facilities hosted in our conference rooms
3) "Windows" into the other facilities whereby each facility has a setup of monitors with a camera in a gathering area (usually near the kitchen) to help promote unity between facilities as well as allow us a cool stop on company tours.
Currently we are using Google Hangouts and after a little education most are really liking it. ?It's no lifesize/cisco telepresence/HP Halo but the cost is right. ?Skype and ichat/facetime are also good options for meetings and we have found many vendors gravitating that way.
Cisco Umi had a decent chance I thought but it looks like they are shelving it. ?I recently ran across Tely ?http://www.tely.com started by the two co-founders of Sonic Wall. ?Looks pretty slick and I'm going to try and get a demo. ?$500 per site ($200/site each year after), connect up to 6 sites, plug and play into the TV. ?Eliminates having to use a macmini or windows box to drive the conference for management meetings and might look pretty cool for the "window" setup.
One concern is the microphone quality as we have seen issues utilizing the audio feature in large conference calls. ?We usually end up doing the audio over the spyder phones.
I have been seeing more than a few TV's coming out with skype built in but have not played around with them much.
Anyone else doing something similar with regards to the "window" thing? ?I suppose a few high quality IP CCTV cameras might be another option. ?