Video Conferencing allows two parties communicate to each other just like visual telephone.

Video Conferencing is used by schools and universities for educating distance learning students and overseas students.

In today’s age many companies hold meetings regularly either within the company to discuss departments’ progress leading to the success of the company or meetings with clients and regional managers overseas. Overseas meetings require managers or representatives to spend airfare and travel expenses. The solution to reduce overseas meetings is purchasing or hiring video conferencing.

The question now arises, what is video conferencing? Well, video conferencing allows two parties communicate and send data each other. It enables viewers to hear and see the speaker; you can say a live version of the telephone just like you have seen in ‘Jetsons’ cartoons.

There are various applications of video conferencing. Multi-national companies use it for discussions, meetings and presentations, schools and universities use it for training and educating distance learning and overseas students, and sometimes general web communications.

The real idea behind video conferencing is being able to communicate with people at long distances visually at real time. It does look like you are watching a television show only if there is high bandwidth feed and no interruptions.

Actually video conferencing itself takes place in the internet from PC to PC, so home users do not really need to purchase high tech equipment separately. Home users only need a camera, a microphone, modem and software to start up their own video conference.

Video conferencing systems are of two kinds, proprietary and standard based.

The applications of proprietary video conferencing can work only through a single vendor since it can only be accessed through closed API’s, which means that it is not compatible with other vendors’ applications. The standard based video conferencing is flexible making it more favorable than the proprietary type.