Traditional conference systems used to be audio-only, designed to optimise intelligibility for all delegates in the room and to facilitate meetings that follow on certain protocol.
Nowadays, conference rooms are becoming collaborative meeting environments, fuelling the need for multimedia conference systems. Televic's multimedia conference system from Questek Advanced Technologies - uniCOS - delivers high quality audio, live HD video, documents and interactivity to delegates in a meeting room.
"Traditionally, the process of merging all the technologies required for a conference led to complex systems, which demanded lots of cabling and interfacing," says Questek Director George van Gils. "A multimedia conference system such as uniCOS significantly simplifies system complexity - built around a high-speed, packet-based conference network that interconnects delegate units in a daisy chain or loop using a single Cat5e cable.
"We are seeing more and more corporate and government institutions turning to dynamic and interactive conferencing such as Televic's uniCOS to embrace the technology resulting in more productive meetings."
HD low latency live video
When displaying live video in the conference room (ie. a close-up view on the speaker), it is extremely important that the live audio is in sync with the image. If not, lip-sync is off. This is extremely annoying and doesn't add to intelligibility. The Televic uniCOS system maintains lip-sync as it brings live video to the delegates and to any point in the room in pristine HD quality and with an extremely low delay of less than a video frame.
Keeping your meeting under control
Offering your meeting delegates live video, document viewing, agenda details, messaging, voting and other advanced functionality is great. It adds to the meeting experience and is intended to increase the efficiency of the meeting. However, there is a fair risk that delegates will become distracted by all these extras and that meeting efficiency will actually go down or that delegates miss an important element in the discussion.
uniCOS therefore offers you the ability to keep control over the meeting through its screen-locking feature. At any point during the meeting, a chairman or operator can direct all delegate screens to certain functionality. When it is time to vote, the chairman can force all delegate units to the voting screen and lock them there, so delegates can't navigate away until voting is over.
In this way you offer great tools to your delegates, but keep them focused on the essentials.
Open standards, yes, but...
With uniCOS, Televic has conscientiously chosen a closed conference network and decided to move all interfacing to the network edge. There the central unit acts as a bridge to the outside world using open standards, such as Dante. This way of working offers the best of both worlds by combining the benefit of being compatible with open standards with three other major advantages.
Firstly, by making the network proprietary, Televic has been able to optimise its performance and allow the network to deliver HD video to the delegates with an extremely low delay.
Secondly, from a security point of view it becomes harder to eavesdrop on the network and it becomes more difficult for viruses to enter the system. Finally, in a network where third party devices are allowed, accountability discussions can arise in case of problems and this is an integrators' nightmare. The proprietary conference network eliminates all this and allows optimal reliability for mission-critical installs.
"We are seeing more and more corporate as well government institutions turning to dynamic and interactive technology such as Televic's uniCOS to optimise collaboration, productivity and efficiency," concludes Questek's Van Gils.
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