Bharti Airtel, has collaborated with seven other network and managed service providers across the world to launch the first video services of the Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC), at Telecommunications Industry Association 2012 (TIA 2012), an annual gathering on technology suppliers, and manufacturers of global communications networks. Through the service, entreprises will soon be able to make and receive video calls as easily as making a voice call.
Partners: According to a press statement, Airtel had collaborated with three other network service providers including AT&T, Masergy, and Orange Business Services to develop the first OVCC compliant interconnect network which will serve as the backbone to support these video calls and allow OVCC members to connect to this network and offer network-agnostic video services including multi-network video calls for enterprise users. The members who will participate in this initial service include AT&T, BCS Global, Bharti Airtel, BT (British Telecom), Glowpoint, Orange Business Services and Verizon.
Features: The consortium’s initial multi-network OVCC compliant video service offerings will offer features like ‘Scheduled Meetings’ which allows users to schedule their meetings for a specific date and time and number of participants who will use an access number and password to dial into a meeting; the ability to share presentations, documents, and PDFs simultaneously during a video conference and a standards based encryption technology. Users will have to simply contact the service provider to setup a video conference, similar to scheduling a teleconference.
Open Visual Communications Consortium: Launched in October 2011, Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) is an independent consortium of global video exchange providers, network providers and equipment manufacturers comprising of members like AT&T, BCS Global, Bharti Airtel, BT Conferencing, Dialogic, Inc., Masergy, Orange Business Services, Polycom, Inc., Teliris, Telstra and Verizon. These members create multi-vendor, multi-network specifications to offer a technical blueprint and a business model to commercialize business-to-business video communications and allow enterprise users to make and receive video calls across standards-based and proprietary video platforms and beyond corporate firewalls.
