Vidyo at the ISTE 2010 SIG IVC Playground

Background: The SIG IVC Playground at ISTE 2010 featured six videoconferencing islands. Participants tried out two HD units and four desktop videoconferencing solutions. We used a pirate theme to make the learning and exploration fun. At each island, attendees had to talk to people in mystery locations to figure out where they were and which content provider they were.

In this blog post, I share what we learned at the Vidyo station.

Vidyo Setup

GCI Alaska assisted us with the Vidyo island setup and provided pirate guides for that island.


In this picture, Craig Moellerstuen explains Vidyo to an attendee.

At this station, the web cam used is a Logitech Quickcam. The audio/speakers used were the Phoenix Duet Executive.

At this island, participants dialed out to:

  1. Amon Carter Museum
  2. Kennedy Space Center
  3. REMC 1 (not a content provider – an educational service agency in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan)
  4. The Sixth Floor Museum

I Learned / Questions I Have

  • I have played with Vidyo several times before (here, here, here, here), and from what I noticed at the playground, it worked very well as expected. Quality was awesome!
  • Vidyo is a great solution for bringing in remote sites to H323 calls – i.e. Craig uses it to bring in guest speakers to talk to students, to connect students who are at remote locations in Alaska to their VC classes, etc. The beauty of it is that you just send a link to the participant – and they just download a little tiny app to get started. Very easy and no messing with the firewall to make it work for the end user.
  • One thing we ran into is dialing aliases. We had planned to put only straight IP address dialing on the Vidyo island; but I messed up and assigned an alias@IP format to it. We weren’t able to get it to connect directly. How does Vidyo handle the Codian menu structure, the Tandberg MPS / endpoint behind a firewall format of alias@IP, and the Polycom IP##alias format. How do we make it do that? I would like to learn. Please comment if you know!

What about you?

Did you make it to the ISTE IVC Playground? Or have you played with Vidyo before? What features should be mentioned? Please comment and be sure to read the comments!

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