RDROOM TO THE DESKTOP Video communication began with Picturephone, a personal conferencing product, and moved on to group-oriented systems. Economies of scale drove the migration. The exorbitant cost of early codecs, and of the bandwidth required to move a compressed audiovisual signal, required amortization across a group. The economics Video Communications: The Whole Picture have changed but the market still lags. The stigmatic legacy of boardroom videoconferencing lingers. Because early installations were costly, the first applications often reflected their boardroom environment. Housed in custom-designed and engineered studios, videoconferences were often formal events that only senior managers and executives attended. Compressed Video Technology Codec Codec Compressed Digitize and Decompress Compress Digital Signal Analog Signal (90 Mbit/s) Figure 1-4. Compressed Video Technology (Michel Bayard). These conference attendees were often SO senior that a dedicated technician attended simply to operate the equipment. Videoconferencing was a tool for recovering productive time that would have been lost to travel for only the most in-demand people, who could not squander their time learning such technical complexities (it was more acceptable at that time for an executive to plead ignorance in the face of technology). That paradigm has changed, and is changing. The ease-of-use challenges posed by early videoconferencing systems are disappearing as virtually every PC that is a video communication appliance (or can become one with a simple software download). Powerful processors make quick work of compression. The cost of a codec, cameras, microphones, and speakers are available at very low costs (if not included in the system), and broadband is ubiquitous. Competition has driven, and is driving, transmission costs increasingly. Fast processors, cheap bandwidth, and system operation simplicity all suggest a market that is poised to skyrocket. The market driver is demand for tools that allow people to lead just-in-time