Yesterday, I spent some time with Bruce Zieper (from Tandberg) investigating the scenario of providing remote viewer access to the MTC Envisioning Center (EC).  We have had some instances where because of travel costs, the entire customer team couldn’t travel to the Irvine MTC so some attendees were participating remotely.  This worked fine until the Envisioning Center demonstration where the remote attendees couldn’t participate because we had no remote access into the EC.

To investigate this issue, Bruce setup the following Tandberg components:

·         Tandberg Content Server (TCS) (http://www.tandberg.com/video-recording-streaming-archiving.jsp)

·         Tandberg Codec C20 (http://www.tandberg.com/video-conferencing-integrators.jsp)

·         Tandberg Video Communications Server (VCS) (http://www.tandberg.com/video-conferencing-network-infrastructure.jsp)

·         Tandberg HD Camera

The Tandberg C20 enables us to integrate multiple HD video streams and using a GUI application layout the multiple streams onto 1 screen and output this one stream.  We took as inputs into the C20 the output from Set1 computer , and a HD video camera and merged this into 1 video stream as a test.  In actual use, we were thinking of splitting the output to the main projector and also routing it to the C20 along with a camera  pointing at the MTC presenters. 

From the C20 output, we connected it to the Tandberg content server (TCS).  The Tandberg Content Server converted it into a media stream and enabled its access through Windows Media Server running inside the TCS.  From a web browser, we were able to view the presentation (although it was slightly delayed due to the encoding).

All in all, it was an exciting first step to trying to get external video access to the EC. 

Another idea that came up during this testing was providing customers in our remote offices (Denver and Phoenix) to participate.  They could come to the local Microsoft office in Phoenix or Denver and participate in an MTC session.