Videoconferencing a means of business worth reconsidering

The improvements have come at the low end, the mid-tier - and spectacularly - the top end of the market, in the form of a system from Hewlett-Packard, Halo. Halo is so good that it has US bosses raving about it, a change from the criticisms that used to be levelled at the technology.

Videoconferencing has been done for long enough to have exposed large numbers of people to its shortcomings. Technology companies in the early 1990s used to like to try to impress journalists (always inadvisable - when things go wrong, taking the mickey becomes irresistible) by staging videoconferences with overseas executives too important to travel to New Zealand.

Quite apart from the self-consciousness of addressing a camera and seeing yourself on a TV screen, such occasions were most memorable for all the fiddling around with the controls, and the jittery time lag as sound and pictures were transmitted across the world.

But that was generations ago in technology lifecycle terms. The bits and pieces that go into videoconferencing systems - computers, telecommunications, software, cameras, screens - have bounded ahead in the past 10 years. Where it used to be that you couldn't do videoconferencing without a special room for the purpose, webcams, the internet and modern PCs mean anyone can conduct a personal videoconference.

Yet despite the advances, videoconferencing can hardly be said to have become the norm for doing business. Deserved or not, the same reservations about the systems persist: they're widely seen as unreliable and clunky.

A clue to their limitations can be gleaned from the Telecom website, which lists tips for users of the telco's videoconferencing service. Don't wear bright or highly patterned clothes, it advises, because it can be distracting. And users are warned that fast movements should be avoided because the system won't keep up.

If compelling benefits can be shown, however, the deficiencies will be overlooked. Schools, for example, are flocking to the technology as a way of sharing teaching resources, among them Raglan Area School, which uses it routinely.

Videoconferencing also played a starring role in the Lord of the Rings, although it may not have been credited for its part. The trilogy required several film crews to be working in different locations at the same time and Peter Jackson, while clearly highly capable, couldn't manage to be directing in several places simultaneously.

He used videoconferencing to keep an eye on the different crews' footage.

Perhaps the rising risk of a bird flu pandemic, international terrorism and the high price of jet fuel will turn more businesses into videoconferencers. If so, but they still have reservations about the quality of the technology, it's probably a good time to acquaint themselves with today's systems.

The market leader is Polycom, sold here by Asnet Technologies. Client services manager Denise Hansen says there's no comparison between the systems of a decade ago and today's - and she's been selling them for a dozen years. A videoconference today is "just like being there", says Hansen, adding that the images are "absolutely clear" and audio "superb". And that's for a price of $5000 to $10,000.

Not everyone's happy with that, though. As might be expected, the bosses of US film studio DreamWorks have high expectations of picture quality and, when they went shopping for a videoconferencing system in 2001, nothing measured up. So they developed their own, in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard.

The resulting high-end system, Halo, went on sale last December, at a price suitable for movie moguls - US$550,000 ($830,000) per suite, with a suite required at each end of a call. On top of that, HP charges an US$18,000 monthly management fee, which includes the cost of the high-speed network needed between suites (about five times faster than the fastest available residential broadband internet connection).

Apart from DreamWorks ("it has changed the way we run the business"), HP has assembled endorsements of Halo from PepsiCo ("one of the best investments we've made to improve business effectiveness and executive quality of life") and computer chip maker AMD ("drastically reduced travel time and expenses").

Halo, with its array of high-resolution TV screens that show life-size images, is designed to eliminate the annoying features of lesser systems. HP says its video and audio feed are such good quality that a Halo meeting is like everyone being in the same room.

That's a remarkably similar-sounding marketing pitch to Polycom. The difference, presumably, is that the HP room is more expensively decorated.