Friday, August 1st will see Dr. Henning Schulzrinne appearing as our featured guest for the 500th(!) edition of the VoIP Users Conference. While presently the CTO of the FCC, Dr. Schulzrinne has along history as a pioneer in the field…
It’s worth noting that a Google “Hangout” is not the same as a “Hangout-On-Air.” A Hangout-On-Air is streamed and recorded via YouTube in real-time. This gives it the potential for much greater reach. A normal Hangout is not streamed in this manner, although it does allow for PSTN connectivity.
This difference is arbitrary, although I’m told it stems from legal concerns about copyright issues that could easily occur if Hangouts-On-Air were allowed to have broad interop capability.
The fact that the VUC uses a Hangout-On-Air has compelled my search for a reliable, high-quality means of interconnecting the Hangout-On-Air and ZipDX conference bridge. Given my long-standing and vociferous support of HDVoice even the PSTN access provided by a plain vanilla Hangout is troubling. Connecting via a pure IP means, like SIP URI, would allow interconnection with much better audio quality.
The VoIP Users Conference is closing upon 500 weekly sessions, each one more-or-less a conference call. Along the way the manner in which the calls happen has evolved. A bit of background about this will serve to frame why I’ve been seeking a way to interconnect a Google+ Hangout and the ZipDX conference bridge.
Next week will mark five years of using ZipDX. In that time we have used ZipDX to host 318 VUC calls, each and every one in HDVoice. My earliest experience with HDVoice arose from being asked to review the new…
Do you remember way back when VUC calls were don using Talkshoe? That was the service that Randulo used to create the VUC, and it remained the primary conference used until the end of 2008. It was in November 2008 that I arranged to have David Frankel of ZipDX make a VUC guest appearance.
David’s visit was unusual in that we used it as an opportunity to expose the assembled audience to conferencing using HDVoice. David was kind enough to provide some licenses for Counterpath’s G.722-capable Eyebeam soft phone. This allowed us to have a dozen people on ZipDX in HDVoice, while the rest of the audience remained on Talkshoe. You can still listen to the archived recording of the call if you’d like.
There have been quite a number of changes going on hereabouts, largely behind the scenes. Some have been mentioned in passing on recent VUC calls. I thought it was about time to break the news more generally. On March 31st…