Public Videoconference Rooms

[StandByVideo]

For more than 9 years there has been an effort to promote the use of available time slots in ISDN videoconference facilities on a rental basis.

The evolution of the public room broker has helped to create a 35 million dollar alternative to compulsory travel that is really still in it's infancy.

As H.323 evolves, and international switched 64K minutes become less and less expensive, the day of the true public travel alternative may be approaching.

Our approach is to fashion Reservation and booking tools for Corporate Travel Agents allowing a convenient alternative through a familiar mechanism.

I would open up a discussion on the importance and or relevance of Public Rooms to the future of business videoconferencing.

http://www.StandByVideo.com/

[pbraatelien]

Standbyvideo,
I hated to see this post go without any reply, however I am thinking that it may be a testament to Public Rooms.
With the price points dropping, and the explosion of bandwidth availability, it may be the public rooms are looked upon as "a nice thing to have available but not something we will use".

Every Public room I have been acquainted with (Kinkos, HQ, private enterprise, reseller) has suffered from underuse. Either it was used so infrequently as to be considered a drain on resources, or it was too difficult to coordinate and schedule (in other words-its primary use was for something else).

Some companies I have worked for have offered them, but I can count on one hand the number of times they actually got used.

Finally, the role of the manufacturers, is to get enterprises to buy their own equipment, not utilize someone else's.

I think it would be difficult to find someone that thinks they are a growing, viable option---

[mazzarak]

We have had our office registered with Affinity for about 4 years and no one has used it yet. We signed an agreement with Regus some time ago whereby they would send us all their business, and it became clear very soon that people were just not interested in paying £500 an hour for something when it would cost a fraction of the cost to go via audio. Likewise, if you have a regular remote meeting (which lets face it is the prime reason for using VC), users realised that the ROI compared to hiring a room was covered after about 4 meetings, so again what's the point?

The only plus points for this facility are in remote areas of the world. -Iraq for example. You search for "Videoconference Room Baghdad" on the WWW and you only find one room. In this sort of area you can see the positives of such a service. In NYC on the other hand, is there an office anywhere that doesn't have VC?

[seifran]

In my company we have 15 rooms listed with various groups as "public", and we get on average 1 or 2 of them used per month.
The usage of our rooms is declining, though mostly because the end units are priced low enough now that most businesses have their own.

The remaining usage is generally job interviews, because my area of Canada could be considered to be "remote" so this is a compromise between flying an applicant to a major center or using a telephone. We also have regular updates provided to local doctors from a pharmaceutical company done in one of rooms monthly. These uses seem to be remaining constant.

Because of the remoteness of some of our sites, we are reluctant to shut this service down. At this rate of use, the costs of lines, etc is barely recovered. We review it on a yearly basis but will likely remove ourselves from the listings eventually.

[StandByVideo]

Great Comments!
Thank you for your contributions.

I recognize all the observations as valid and starting with pbraatelien; there is absolutely no question that Public Rooms are under utilized. At the beginning of this project, the average was under 3% utilization.

To mazzarak's points the density of corporate VC equipment has nearly quadrupled in less than 4 years, and as seifran is said most Public Rooms feel fortunate to cover the cost of their re-curring expenses.

These points are all directly related to the purpose behind StandByVideo.

The mission of StandByVideo is to drive videoconferencing into the main stream as a practical, affordable and convenient alternative to compulsory business travel.

The problem is not the technology, or even the cost, it is confusion and misinformation over the process.

StandByVideo trains and builds tools for Corporate Travel professionals to facilitate the use of Public Videoconference rooms as an enhancement to conventional Corporate Travel products.

Our goals are to increase utilization from less than 3% to more than 5% in 2005 by making the process convenient and familiar.

If you are interested in participating, it takes only a few minutes to join us:
http://www.standbyvideo.com/general/new_user.php

I am a believer in the sheer power and efficiency of videoconferencing, and I believe that combined with travel it provides a very high level of productivity.

John Harrington

[davethetech]

How about persnal use, I have access to a videoconference room in Toronto, Canada and would like to connect to my mother in the UK. The Location in England is Surrey and the convenient towns would be Guildford or Farnham, any help locating a public room would be appreciated. Thanks

[mazzarak]

hi Dave

a quick scan at www.eyenetwork.co.uk shows 1 room in Farnham and 3 in Guildford.

Hope this helps

Andy

[StandByVideo]

Dave, here is a handy International Room Finder you can bookmark:
https://nyx.safe-order.net/standbyvideo/general/RMF/rmf.php
Cheers!

[StandByVideo]

VTCTalk has an amazingly broad base of support!

I have been delighted recently to welcome new Public Videoconference rooms that have come from this forum!
In exchange we will be placing a link promoting and recommending this forum by our affiliates and users.

Very impressive!

Cheers!

[VCRESOURCE]

I noted this discussion and have a couple of comments on the issue. I have been in the public videoconference field for about 9-10 years now and have noted both the good and bad of the industry. It seems to me that many public users are left with a bad taste in their mouth after conferences for a couple of reasons, all dealing with the costs involved.

I work for a court reporting firm in Cincinnati, OH along with running an online videoconference public room directory, and we average about 10-15 conferences a month for local clients (this does not include work from networks such as Affinity and the like). I think this is because we take a customer friendly point of view towards videoconferencing and the pricing involved to clients of which I can state 4 main examples:

1) Scheduling Fees: Put simply we don't charge them - how dificult is it to schedule a point to point videoconference for a client. On the high side I would say it takes approximately 15 minutes to schedule a conference and get it on the books, not to mention the ease if someone is just calling to use your room and all you have to do is fill out a reservation form and put it in your calendar. Yet there are still companies out there charging scheduling fees on top of their room rentals of $50.00 or more for 10-15 minutes work. Personally, when I am trying to schedule a conference with another location and have a choice I will schedule it with the room that doesn't charge me $50.00 to write it down in their calendar.

2) Cancellation Fees: This is another charge that can really turn away customers and is very rarely necessary. Back in the day when videoconferencing equipment had limited availability and was extremely expensive the necessity was to get your money back on your investment and hence cancellation fees came into existance. Unfortunately, as time and the industry has evolved, many videoconference facilities have not. With increased competition and the ability to afford there own equipment much more easily, why would customers not get upset at what many consider outrageous cancellation fees. Now don't get me wrong, if you have turned away business due to a scheduling that cancels, they should be billed some amount. I can even understand a small cancellation fee to compensate for the time of scheduling a conference. However, half or more of the room rental for a cancelled conference that didn't cause you to turn away business and lose money otherwise will only serve to piss off clients and have them find other means to conduct their next meeting.

3) Rental Hours Billing: This feeds off of the last subject and probably upsets me the most about public rooms. Nothing can drive away business quicker than charging a client for more time than he/she uses for the conference. I have run into many rooms that bill for time reserved as opposed to time used. This also is a major detractor to clients of mine in the legal field. For example, many attorneys use videoconferencing to conduct out of town depositions. Depositions, for those not in the industry, can be hard to estimate in terms of time. The answer to one question by a witness can cause a depo to last an hour longer or end an hour early. I recently had a conference that was scheduled for 3 hrs of which half of it was after hours. The conference ended up only going 1.5 hours and not extending into afterhours time. However, the bill from the far room was for 3 full hours including half of it (which was never used) at the after-hours rate. Personally, I can only think of this as ripping the client off and sacrificing long-term profits for short-term gain. Again, this is one where I can understand charging the full room rental if you had to turn away business because of the conference that ended early, but just charging it because you want to only serves to drive away your business and that of others in the industry who are stigmatized by these type of billing practices. Also, if it comes to the point where you are going to turn away business because of a previously scheduled conference, be customer friendly and give the client a call making them aware of the situation and the possibility of extra charges and see whether they want to revise their time estimate. Who knows, you may end up being able to run two conferences and make two clients happy rather than turning one away and pissing the other off.

4) ISDN Charges: Finally, with the significant reduction in ISDN rates it amazes me that some companies still charge upwards of $100 - $120 per hour for a 384k call. This can be the case for one of two reasons, either the company is not aware that they are paying way too much for ISDN fees or they are blatantly overcharging their clients for the line charges. Either way, it is another factor in causing people who want to use videoconferencing to resort to other means to conduct a meeting and save money.

Well that's my two cents worth on the lack of use of public rooms that many in the industry experience. Others may have other opinions which I would love to hear.

Kirk McCracken

[turbo]

I just entered the public vc rooms industry and was surprised to discover that despite theoretical bright future, the whole industry feels a bit like yesterday’s soup.

Most public rooms belong to large corporate of even non-profit bodies, who are simply trying to offset their own underuse. Hence, many customers have been put off by the lack of customer and technical support, unfriendliness and simply bad connection quality of the outdated equipment.

We have registered with all the directories and middlemen we could find online and in the past month there was only one client referred by them.

It looks like to make public rooms popular there should be a serious change of attitude towards vc both on behalf of the facilities and the users. It should be easy, quick and cheap. Since the equipment is getting cheaper and more companies own it, maybe public rooms should offer value added features like advanced presentation, multisite and security, or maybe they should focus on small businesses?

Regarding charges I totally agree with Vcresource. We also don't charge booking fee and do our best to ensure return business rather than squeezing a quick back out of them.

And what do you think?

[StandByVideo]

We are delighted to see VTCTalk back and better than ever!
We have adopted this Forum as the recommended resource for our network, and it appears with in the calendar section of each affiliates account.

Our philosophy began with and succeeds today as convenience and service being of greater importance than cost.

It remains our principal mision to compel 1 out of 100 business travelers to substitue a videoconference for a plane ticket, just one day out of 365

http://www.standbyvideo.com/general/faq.htm
To accomplish that is more an issue of communication, visibility, convenience and service, then it is price.

By avoiding the situations were all the attention is on nickels and dimes, we have been able to concentrate on growing value, and the result had been strong and sustained growth.

We have partnered in 2005 with an Australian firm, and we have begun negotiations with a young company in the UK.

By standardizing availability information, and concentrating on service within areas of business concentration with projects like www.RemoteInterviews.com and www.RemoteDepositions.com we are looking forward to a very successful 2006 and we are very thankful for the forward thinking independant room Owners that make up our International network.

Any professional videoconference room that would like to join our network, can visit http://www.standbyvideo.com/general/new_user.php

Cheers!
John Harrington
www.VideoconferenceRooms.com

[shailandra]

Oh yes!!!

We at reliance Infocomm are working for the same concept. Our business model includes 241 VC rooms across 111 cities of India with a amazing price of just 45 US$ per hour . Never the less quality is Important for us ... each VC room is standardised , equipped with Polycom,one Samsung 49" Plasma for display & state of the art Denon surround sound system, about network also all rooms are connected with exclusive MPLS VPN to operate on the B.W. of 768 Kbps along with MGC 100 Bridgeing facility to give you real good audio-video quality during the conference.

The change of attitude towards VC rooms can be obtained by offering the service at such a price where a commen man can use it. Our business model has been successful where we offer Videoconferencing as a retail service to an ordinary man who have never used this before or have a perception of costly serive.

I just entered the public vc rooms industry and was surprised to discover that despite theoretical bright future, the whole industry feels a bit like yesterday’s soup.

Most public rooms belong to large corporate of even non-profit bodies, who are simply trying to offset their own underuse. Hence, many customers have been put off by the lack of customer and technical support, unfriendliness and simply bad connection quality of the outdated equipment.

We have registered with all the directories and middlemen we could find online and in the past month there was only one client referred by them.

It looks like to make public rooms popular there should be a serious change of attitude towards vc both on behalf of the facilities and the users. It should be easy, quick and cheap. Since the equipment is getting cheaper and more companies own it, maybe public rooms should offer value added features like advanced presentation, multisite and security, or maybe they should focus on small businesses?

Regarding charges I totally agree with Vcresource. We also don't charge booking fee and do our best to ensure return business rather than squeezing a quick back out of them.

And what do you think?

[senthil]

hi
we are offereing public bridging service in India. We have 12 prot MCU with 2 PRI and 1 MB ADSL Lines for public or corporates,who wants to use our facility may contact us.

Offering more serviecs
VC Hire
Event Managemnet
Gateway Services
More..

Senthil.