Polycom to Cut Video Conferencing Bandwidth by Half

The High Profile implementation of the H.264 video compression standard leverages the same advancements that went into the development of the MPEG 4 video standard, said John Antanaitis, Polycom vice president of product marketing.

But the High Profile implementation of the H.264 standard has yet to be widely adopted by providers of video conferencing systems. Polycom will be working with network infrastructure allies such as Juniper Networks to help drive adoption of the standard.

The basic idea behind the standard is to rely more on the processing capabilities of the end point to reduce the amount of bandwidth required to send video signals across the network, he said.

Support for the H.264 High Profile standard comes on the heels of Polycom’s announcement of interoperability between its video conferencing offerings and unified communications software from Microsoft; new, more efficient provisioning tools for setting up video conferences; and smarter management tools that help ensure high availability of servers running Polycom’s video conferencing software.