A Tale of Two Shows: Supercomm and Infocomm

Infocomm, on the other hand, presented solutions for education and enterprise. Numerous companies—including Accordent, Anystream, Sonic Foundry, and Tegrity—showcased rich media capture and delivery solutions. Several videoconferencing manufacturers, such as Tandberg and Polycom, showcased the interoperability of the H.264 codecs they use as well as collaboration tools.

Sonic Foundry’s James Dias presented a keynote at Educomm—held in conjunction with Infocomm—highlighting the ways business and educational users are leveraging rich media capture systems to better replicate the classroom or training room teaching environment.

Infocomm also served as the launching pad for several products that were first shown as prototypes at NAB. Envivio, Inc. and Visual Systems Integration Group, Inc. showcased the new Envivio 4Forum Lite MPEG-4 webcasting system, a lightweight, portable "plug & play" appliance that live broadcasts of MPEG-4 presentations, with video synchronized to presenter screen captures.

Visionary Solutions, Inc. (VSI) showcased MPEG-2 rackmount encoders that complement VSI’s small form-factor, sub-$1000 MPEG-2 encoder family. The new rackmount encoder adds dual balanced XLR audio inputs, but keeps the price point well below industry averages.

"This was our first Infocomm show," said Will Bakewell, VSI’s VP of marketing, "but we were impressed by the way Infocomm has emerged as more than just the video projector show it was known as just a few years ago. The potential customers who stopped by our booth understood the benefits of streaming media and were interested in high-quality, competitively priced encoders we offer."

Microspace, a satellite IP uplink provider, also noted the changing face of Infocomm. "Our primary customers in this market are systems integrators that have moved beyond single-location installations," said Microspace’s Greg Weaver. "We’re finding integrators are interested in delivering MPEG-4, Windows Media, and still images, primarily for multiple-location digital signage applications. To meet the needs of smaller integrators, we’ve repackaged our pricing away from the flat-rate, always-on model that was popular in satellite IP delivery two years ago to a per-bit, pay-as-you-go model that allows satellite IP delivery to effectively compete with terrestrial IP delivery to multiple retail locations."