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Video phone calls

What is a video phone call?

• It is a means of simultaneous, two-way communication comprising both audio and video elements.
• Participants in a video phone call can both see and hear each other in real time.
• Initially conceived as an extension to the telephone, video telephony is now possible using computers with network connections.

In addition to general personal use, there are specific professional applications, such as criminal justice, health care delivery, and surveillance that can greatly benefit from video telephony.

How does it work?

The basis of communication over the Internet is the Internet Protocol (IP), which allows for data in packets to be routed to different addresses using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

• The data in the packets may be voice, video, data, graphics, and so forth. Thus, multimedia exchanges may take place between two or more parties.
• The exchanges can be over the public Internet or over private corporate intranets.
  • Some companies have started replacing their traditional telephone private branch exchanges (PBXs) with IP-based PBXs, which would theoretically allow everyone in the company to have a video or multimedia telephone—totally separate from a computer. This could provide, for example, unified messaging—the ability to store voice mail as e-mail, answer telephone calls with e-mails and vice versa.
  • Small residential video telephones, computer-based desktop video telephones, and small videoconferencing setups have been introduced to fulfill diverse needs.
  • One such commercially available residential videophone is about as big as a typical office desk telephone with a small flip-up screen that has an eyeball camera above it.

For companies

For residential use

Is software required?

• Videotelephony software has been developed and made widely available that permits real-time collaboration and conferencing, including multipoint and point-to-point conferencing.
• Multipoint means, for example, that three people in three different locations could have a video telephone conference call in which each could see and hear the others.
• In addition to the basic audio and video capabilities, such software provides several other features such as a whiteboard, background file transfer, program sharing, and remote desktop sharing.

What do you need to make a video phone call?

• Video phone calls can take place between two computers or dedicated video telephone equipments.You can utilize one or more of the devices such as:

Video call through phones

Also known as “videophone”, or “video conferencing”, this feature lets

• Two people with 3G video phones talk to each other while viewing 2-way live video of each other.
• Some phones with this feature have a camera that rotates or swivels, so it can face the user for video calling, and face “out” for taking photos. Other phones have two cameras – one facing in and one facing out.
• This feature requires a 3G network that specifically supports video calling. It will only work when the phone is in range of such a network. Both phones must also support video calling – not all 3G phones do. A one-way variant also exists called “video sharing”.