Most people have a  general idea of what videoconferencing is — it’s sort of like a telephone conversation with live video thrown in.

In the old days, videoconferencing was clunky, complicated, and unreliable, primarily because phone lines were designed to carry voices, not huge amounts of audio and video data. With the introduction of broadband and improvements in video technology and data compression, videoconferencing improved by leaps and bounds and now offers a high-quality venue for true-to-life, face-to-face conferencing in real time.

Here, we introduce you to the various components required in a videoconferencing system, describes the three main forms of videoconferencing, and deliver a brief primer on how a videoconferencing session takes place.

Essential Components

To videoconference, you need special audio/video equipment installed in each location that will be involved in the conference along with a data pipeline that connects all locations:

• One or more cameras at each location to capture the video
• One or more microphones at each location to capture the audio
• Codec (compressor/decompressor) at each location to compress outgoing data and decompress incoming data — a codec is typically a specialized device or software that runs on a computer
• One or more…

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