Palmskype

Lifesize, a video telepresence maker-of-thingies, just announced support for a new video telepresence thingy called the Passport.

Hook up the Passport to a 720p HDTV (or other HDMI enabled monitor) and a 1mbit/up Internet connection, and you have a teleconferencing system.  Since many places have both HDTVs and 1mbit/up connections, this vastly opens up the number of places that you can do teleconferencing from.

Certain practical limitations apply, of course.  For example, while it might be theoretically possible to use a bar’s wi-fi connection and HDTV for teleconferencing, I do not think it’s a good idea to do so when a game is on.

The standards list includes a number of protocols, so it should interoperate pretty well with existing teleconferencing equipment – meaning you can have your salespeople check in from the road, telecommuters checking in from home, etc.

One interesting side-note is that the device supports Skype at 720p30 resolution.  I’m not sure what the resolution of Skype phone calls are now, but I think they’re maxed out at 640x480p30 for the desktop client – obviously, that’s going to cause a bit of a bump in Skype traffic for organizations that use Lifesize. (You are monitoring this stuff in your organization, right?)

But there’s another issue with the Skype calling.  That is, Skype has become a defacto standard for teleconferencing among consumers (though they’d just call it “video chat”).  At the $2500 price-tag for the Passport, while it’s pricy, it’s not too pricey for some early adopters who want to use it as a personal telepresence device.  I could see an upper-middle-class family dropping $5000 on it (one on each end) to keep tabs on a kid at college, for example. All of this requires sufficient network performance – about 1mbps, as mentioned earlier – and many “broadband” networks in the U.S. do not have that kind of speed.  At any rate, if these things get popular, we’re talking about increased demand for broadband speeds and increased usage of networks for latency sensitive communications.