Cisco’s $599 1080P telepresence system
Cisco is launching a new high quality 1080P telepresence system called UMI for the home at an astounding price of $599, but with a monthly service cost of $25 for unlimited calls (presumably over Cisco’s managed network). Customers will need at least 1.5 Mbps upload and download on their broadband connection to use 720P mode and at least 3.5 Mbps to use 1080P mode (which is the same bitrate for YouTube 1080P content).
According to Speedtest.net, the United States averages 2.85 Mbps for upload speed so there should be a sizable market that UMI can reach. Anyone who can afford a UMI system will likely be on the higher end broadband connection or they can upgrade to one.
$599 for a high-end 1080P conferencing unit with this level of quality definitely breaks new grounds and I can see some high income homes with higher tier broadband connections going for this. I imagine that the price is not much higher than the bare bone bill of materials. The camera and microphone system alone would be expensive because it needs a very good lens and sensor to provide a 1080P video source with sufficiently clear and low noise characteristics suitable for high compression. The set top box needs a very high performance chip that can simultaneously encode and decode 1080P video and that isn’t cheap. It is noteworthy that Intel’s next generation embedded Atom systems should handle this which means the cost of these systems will go down.
For now, UMI only talks to other UMI devices or lower resolution Google Talk clients running on PC or Mac. Unfortunately, no connectivity to Skype 720P clients or Logitech Vid is supported at this time. UMI also won’t support standards based video conferencing systems like Tandberg, Polycom, Lifesize (now Logitech), or even Cisco telepresence devices. Lack of compatibility with a Cisco device sounds strange, but it is likely the result of product segmentation and the need to avoid cannibalization of Cisco’s higher end products selling for $30K. Of course there’s nothing to prevent business customers from using UMI in their conference rooms and they’re far more likely to tolerate the $25/month fee than consumers.
Do you think something like this could be binned in with an ISP’s “Managed services”? The average home user (myself included) only has advertised upload rates of 2Mbit so a capability like this would consume nearly ALL of my upload bandwidth. Plus there is a difference between advertised and actual… However if Cisco could get an arrangement with the ISP’s to tap into their “managed services” portion of the cable line coming into my home I would definetely be interested. Problem is I would probably only be willing to pay another $5-10 on top of the $25 they advertise.
That being said I would still have concerns about compatibility and would be MUCH more likely to buy if I found out that they were following standards based communications (or open API’s) so that compatibility wasn’t an issue.
$25-35 a month is competitive with current phone bills and being able to do video calling instead of just audio would be a huge draw.
@Garrett
This would indeed be a good candidate for a managed service. Two valuable features would be.
1. Boost bandwidth beyond what the consumer paid for, especially the upstream.
2. Manage the jitter and prioritize the video calls.
The Cisco product doesn’t ship until the last week of October.
This is all speculative.
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