But video conferences are poised to get a lot more panoramic and interactive thanks to a stealth startup called Altia Systems, which is introducing its PanaCast video system Tuesday. The setup — which involves a Linux-based camera, allows users to get a high-definition, 60 frames-per-second, 200-degree view, which they can zoom in and pan around with using gestures or a mouse.

So instead of passively watching a presentation, viewers can survey an entire room and focus on whatever they want to. They don’t have to rely on a motorized camera on one end or a fish-eye lens that distorts the video. And they’ll be able to do it for less than $700 when the system becomes available in the first quarter of next year.

PanaCast’s portable camera, which connects via Ethernet, actually has six cameras inside. The company’s software stitches the images together into one wide view that is 2700×540. PanaCast transports the video over a standard 1920×1080 format by basically unfolding the stream so its double the width at half the height of standard HD video. The company, which has raised $3 million from Lanza techVentures and Dado and Rey Banatao, has also come up with its own codec that allows it to bring down latency to a millisecond. And the software, for which Altia has received one patent on so far, is also extremely efficient and can dynamically optimize the stream for changing network conditions.

As part of its marketing push, Altia has launched a Kickstarter campaign for PanaCast. A limited number of supporters who donate $399 or more can secure a camera starting in January.

Aurangzeb Khan, CEO and president of Altia Systems said this provides an affordable way to conduct video conferences, that are high-quality but also very interactive. It might take on Cisco’s pricy telepresence systems in some accounts, for example. Instead of paying sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tele-conference room and additional expenses for dedicated T-1 lines, Altia customers can push out video to a handful of users directly from the camera, which has its own linux server inside. Or they can connect to PanaCast Cloud, which will allow companies to broadcast to many more users.

Altia Systems expects to release more product information and final pricing in December. The company is working on applications for iOS, Android, Windows and Macs that will allow users to tune in and watch the PanaCast videos.

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Hookflash users will sign-in with a LinkedIn account and will be able to communicate with other LinkedIn users in their contact list, which is populated from their LinkedIn directory. Users will be able to see the profile of who they’re talking to and will see their latest updates from their activity feed, so there’s helpful context for each call. If a recipient is not available to receive a call or message, they will get a push notification that takes them into the app.

The iPad app will be joined soon by an iPhone app and then a version for Android later this year. The service will also get calendaring, scheduling and other productivity tools as it evolves. Multi-party video calling is also on tap later this year, though the service is not meant to take on WebEx and other conferencing systems.

Co-founder Erik Lagerway told me that the goal is to become a next generation business phone, replacing traditional handsets from Cisco or Polycom. That should put Hookflash in competition with Skype and other enterprise VoIP services. He said the integration of LinkedIn is a smart way to utilize the network and appeal to business users, who increasingly turn to LinkedIn as their tool for staying in touch with business associates.

“Most of the people I communicate with from a business perspective are all on LinkedIn; it’s my business Rolodex,” said Lagerway. “We want to make sure we use that directory in a way that’s absolutely seamless.”

IT managers might not embrace Hookflash out of the gate, admits Lagerway, but he said that as bring-your-own-device policies becomes the standard, it opens up opportunities for services like Hookflash in corporate settings. He said business users also long for more communications choices, which are not as plentiful as consumer services.

Hookflash was supposed to hit the market earlier this spring, but got held up as the company completed the P2P technology underlying the app. Hookflash has developed its own P2P protocol called Open Peer that will enable additional services, such as file sharing. Hookflash is opening up the spec to other developers who will be able to build services off the same technology. Open Peer, for example, could be dropped into customer relationship management or other enterprise applications, enabling simple communications and other uses.

Hookflash, which debuted at the DEMO conference last fall, has raised a little more than $2 million to date and is close to finishing up a $3 million round. The company is hoping to make money through a freemium model, with added premium features layered over the free service in the future. There’s also an opportunity to license its P2P technology to carriers and other communications companies, said Lagerway.

I think Hookflash is an intriguing service, making LinkedIn potentially more powerful for business users. My LinkedIn directory is often an afterthought, but it’s still a big network of people that I continue to add to.  I might be tempted to utilize it more now with Hookflash. Airtime showed how a consumer video application can ride atop Facebook’s graph. But I think Hookflash could have more of an impact because there aren’t other communications services that are building on top of LinkedIn. I don’t think it’s ready to kill the traditional business phone overnight, but this could really be helpful for certain kinds of use cases in which business colleagues want to reach out to each other quickly and casually.

I think it would make sense for LinkedIn to eventually try to incorporate Hookflash into its own mobile apps and website, making it even more of a daily destination and utility for users. An acquisition by LinkedIn might be a logical next step if the technology proves durable. That might be the future for Hookflash though Lagerway said the company is looking at integrating with other social networks in the future.

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When FaceTime first emerged, 9to5Mac performed some 3G tests on jailbroken iPhones to determine just how much bandwidth the app would consume. It’s findings: 3 MB per minute. So if you had a $30/2 GB plan from Verizon you could feasibly support 666 minutes of FaceTime calling, while a 3 GB plan at the same price from AT&T would give you an even 1000 minutes of video talk time.

Now look what those same carriers charge for voice minutes: For base level voice plans both AT&T and Verizon charge you me $40 for 450 minutes and $60 for 900 minutes. Making a FaceTime video call winds up being a heck of lot cheaper than a straight up phone call.

Before you get the bright idea of replacing your voice service entirely with FaceTime and a data SIM card, know there are some limitations, the biggest of which is FaceTime only works between Apple products. 3G network coverage, even over Verizon’s extensive CDMA network, can be spotty, and just because there is a 3G signal available to you doesn’t guarantee you’ll get enough of bandwidth to support a video call. Carriers’ circuit-switched voice services may be expensive, but for the most part they work — a claim we can’t yet make for 3G.

Of course, supplementing your voice service with FaceTime might not be a bad idea especially if a lot of your contacts own iPhones, iPads and Macs. Knocking $20 to $30 off your minute plans (AT&T and Verizon both sell unlimited voice for $70 a month) and replacing it with the next higher tier of data could wind up saving you a lot of money. Many consumers might not even need to bother with a data plan upgrade. According to a recent report from Ericsson, iPhone users only consume on average 350 MB of month of data over global HSPA networks, which puts them well out of reach of most data caps.

As for the operators — who already claim their 3G networks are overtaxed — this is probably not an ideal development. Not only would a sudden deluge of FaceTime calls load up their networks even more, the service could start impacting their voice revenues. Since they make far more for on a minute of voice than they would on a minute of FaceTime data, they have far more to lose.

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Today’s launch event for Airtime, the Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning social video chat service, was a good metaphor for the product it was showcasing: the star-studded event was poorly planned and showy without enough depth. After starting more than 40 minutes late, the press event turned into more of a celebrity-spotting spectacle with stars like Jim Carrey, Jimmy Fallon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joel McHale and others clowning around as they tried to divert attention away from demos that continued to run into technical problems.

That’s not to say that Airtime can’t succeed at some point, but I came away feeling like the service needed more seasoning and substance to be really interesting. Now, after spending more time with the application, I feel like Airtime is more of a shallow roll-up of other familiar services: there isn’t enough there there yet.

Here’s a synopsis of Airtime:

• It’s a one-to-one, web-based video chat service built using Facebook as a social layer. The chats happen at Airtime.com but users can get notified of incoming chats through a message in Facebook when they’re logged in.
• Airtime offers a service for watching video simultaneously: users in a chat can start playing a video that both participants can view similar to Google Hangouts. Users can share only YouTube videos for now, either the stuff they’re previously shared on Facebook or they can find other videos through a YouTube search function.
• The final feature is taken from Chatroulette, allowing people to jump into random video chats with strangers. They can filter by their current location, friends of friends, shared interests or some limited trending topics or they can just look for anyone to meet. The service reportedly has humans monitoring screen shots of conversations between strangers and the system uses machine learning and computer vision to flag potential bad behavior.

Part of the appeal of Airtime is that it brings together these different video-chat features into one tool. But a roll-up really only works if people are genuinely excited about doing all these things in one application. I might not be the target audience here, but I don’t actually see myself wanting to talk with other people just because we happen to live in the same city or have one thing in common. And I’m not sure a new destination site is going to get me to stop doing video chats over Skype, Facetime or Google Hangouts. These feelings became more apparent as I used the service.

When hopping into chats with strangers, I first of all had problems with Airtime’s filters. When I narrowed my filters down to only friends of friends, it offered me people I have no connection with. When I tried to just meet people with shared interests, I got a couple people that I have nothing in common with. One time on this setting, I was told I was talking to someone who lived in New York like me. But that person was actually in India and had never been to New York.

I understand if Airtime is willing to be flexible with the filters at the start to ensure people get a match but it can lead to awkward moments where you realize you don’t even have one thing to really talk about.Another time, I was paired with someone only after I said I liked the New York Times. But sitting there with this guy, I don’t see how this connection could spark anything interesting. The conversation ended quickly.

There are things I do like about the service. The video quality is pretty good and it seems to hold a connection well. I can get up and going pretty quickly and the video sharing feature is seamless.

But after spending more time with the service, it feels like it needs more. I can understand getting something out the door, but it feels like it should have a launched with a mobile app or multi-party support. Right now, it’s a Flash-based application and it runs primarily on desktops. I’m told mobile apps are coming soon but I think it should have been there at the start considering how mobile people are these days. Or Airtime should have brought some Google Hangouts multiparty chat features to the party. That would make watching videos together more interesting and fun. Right now, I can’t imagine going through that many videos together with one person. And since the videos are only limited to YouTube videos, I can’t share anything I’ve uploaded directly to Facebook or other services.

One of the issues I’ve noticed so far is that it’s a lot of guys on the service. This may change over time, but it also brings up some of the same questions with Chatroulette. Are women going to be as eager to show their faces to strangers as men? Some might but many single women I’ve talked to said they’re not interested in meeting people this way. It’s too early to say if we’re going to see bad behavior or if Airtime’s security features will ferret out exhibitionists. But I still think that even if everything is PG, it still can be creepy for a lot of people.

A couple of other small gripes and observations:

• There’s a system for awarding a fellow chat participant with stars. But there’s no limit to what you can give someone so it’s pretty meaningless.
• In addition to multiparty chats, I’d like to have the ability to share files during video chats and also record conversations as well. That could be useful for conducting video interviews that I can integrate into blog posts.
• I’d also like the ability to zoom in on a particular location besides my own or search for someone to talk to about one specific topic. That would be cool for larger events or to get a man-on-the-ground report from some big event. Right now, there is a ticker that runs along the chat window showing some recent trending interests so you can chat with someone about that particular topic. But you can’t pick out your own topic.
• I did have some problems connecting with a couple of friends, who were on Facebook but somehow couldn’t receive my calls.
• While watching shared video, there doesn’t seem to be a way to adjust your own voice separately from the video’s sound levels. I found myself shouting a little to be heard over noisy parts in the video.

I think Parker and Fanning are too smart to let Airtime stumble around for long. And I think they have some interesting ideas around real-time interaction and how video can be an expressive and humanizing medium. I’ve been thinking about video lately and how it’s become more casual over time, as people find it easier to video chat or broadcast their lives without having much to say. But what’s driving some of those trends is really mobile and multi-party interaction, something Airtime doesn’t have yet.

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There are three features in Airtime:

• There’s a simple one-to-one, web-based video chat service that doesn’t require registration or a download. You just log-in through Facebook. You can talk to other Facebook friends and get notifications for chats through Airtime’s Facebook integration.
• Users can watch shared video together in real time and stay in a video chat as they view the video. For instance, you can watch a YouTube video together with a friend while also being able to see each other. Videos that a user previously shared on Facebook are listed under their Airtime profile and can be clicked on for live viewing. Or users can find new videos with using YouTube video search.
• And there’s the Chatroulette-like feature that allows strangers to meet outside of their Facebook connections. Users can talk to other people in their area, friends of friends and people with common interests. And chat users can share their interests with each other easily and see what they have in common.

Sean Parker said Airtime is meant to be a network service similar to Facebook or Skype. The goal is to build a service that taps the real-time potential of the Web and lets people find others and express themselves in ways that are often constrained when relying on existing social graphs.

The live chat feature is built in with security to flag abuse and monitor for bad behavior, Parker said. Human reviewers monitor screen shots of chats between strangers, while machine learning and computer vision help aid reviewing in spotting abuse. The Facebook log-in, with real profiles attached to behavior, is also meant to keep people in line. Parker repeatedly stressed Airtime’s security features, trying to make a distinction between Chatroulette, which became known for guys showing off their junk.

A parade of stars including Snoop Dogg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alicia Keyes, Ed Helms, Joel McHale and Olivia Munn helped Parker show off the service during a very glitchy demonstration. But despite the celebrity endorsements, Airtime faces plenty of challenges. The video chat service will compete with Skype, Oovoo and a host of mobile-focused chat services. The service sounds more safe than Chatroulette and the interest-based matching is helpful, though many people aren’t clamoring to talk to strangers. As someone next to me said, “I don’t even like to video chat with my friends.”

The social video sharing feature is nice and taps into some of the popularity of services like SocialCam and Viddy with the ability to watch together live. That’s interesting but again, it requires people to be on together. It’d be nice if groups could view videos together in a group chat but that’s not available at launch. And Airtime overall doesn’t support mobile devices for now, so smartphones and tablet users need not apply.

Still, I’m interested to see how this all pans out. As I wrote recently, live “ambient” video is becoming a new form of communication, allowing people to be more casual and spontaneous with friends. Just as pictures have become a simple language of their own, video has the potential to be a much more powerful way for people to interact, share and be creative.

But I think Airtime will need to evolve some more to make it clear why people want to spend their time there. A big splashy launch event is helpful in drumming up attention and it shows that Parker and Fanning definitely have some big-time pull. But the proof will be in how many regular people show up and use the service, a factor that doomed the initial launch of Color, a photo and video-sharing app that is trying again through a partnership with Verizon.

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Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Video tells the story

That got me thinking about the evolution video. It’s similar in some sense to how pictures have undergone a transformation. We used to take pictures to preserve memories, using precious film to capture significant moments. But with advent of digital cameras and later mobile phones with cameras, pictures became akin to a casual form of communication, giving rise to services like Instagram and others.

Video chatting and broadcasting is also evolving in a similar manner. We used to think about scheduling Skype chats and video conferences.  Uploading a video to YouTube meant you often edited the video or at least reviewed it. But now, we’re seeing that video is becoming this casual, immediate medium that doesn’t have to convey anything special.

Cheaper broadband+free video services

Jackman believes the rise of ambient video is due to cheaper broadband and the growth of free services that allow users to use video with little regard to cost. The fact that video chatting can increasingly be multiparty also lends itself to this idea of video as an emerging background layer to life.

Google is seeing more people leave Google Hangouts on for long periods of time, according to Iska Hain, a company spokeswoman.

“We definitely see that use case, especially at Google where colleagues will jump into a Hangout from remote offices and we all do work together. Sometimes people do like to just ‘be around’ other people. There are cases of folks turning a hangout on while they go about cooking or knitting or painting,” Hain said.

Foursquare has set up a big screen video portal inside both of its New York and San Francisco offices that are constantly on, allowing people to see each other and organize impromptu meetings.

“I can just go up to the screen and shout someone’s name and they’ll come to the portal,” said Benjy Weinberger, Foursquare’s San Francisco engineering lead.  

Increasingly comfortable with live-sharing

It’s not just with video conferencing. People are increasingly more casual with video sharing as well. I was reminded of this when talking to Bill Nguyen, the co-founder of Color. Color, as we wrote recently, has signed a deal with Verizon to put its live video-sharing app on Verizon phones. The app allows users to start recording a video and alerts their friends that a live broadcast has started.

When I first heard about that, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sending out video before having the option to edit it. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen at the end of that clip. But that’s where things are going. We’ve seen that with other live-streaming services: people are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives and letting the world see whatever happens.

Gil Eyal, vice president of marketing for Mobli, a mobile photo and video sharing service, said increasingly people are just uploading videos directly to the service without editing out mistakes or taking a look again at what they’re showing.

“We’re seeing more spontaneous video, it’s all raw and unedited,” said Eyal. “It’s just people being real and video becoming this common language.”

Not everyone is ready for this kind of spontaneous, always-on video world. But it’s a natural extension of the trends were seeing in technology and social media. The barriers separating the private and the public are crumbling thanks to social and technological tools that make it easy to share. The same ideas at work behind Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, will also spur people to be more open and free with video.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tyler Olsen.

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The end result? You can walk around a real-time visual representation of the person at the other end of the conversation. Watch the video demo that I found through the Digital Trends site:

The technology isn’t limited to video conferencing though. By applying the technology to a different application, the Human Research Lab has also shown off the BodiPod; a 3-D visualization of the human body. Viewers can walk around the body and even have different body layers appear based on how close they’re standing to the BodiPod.

The camera resolution in Microsoft’s Kinect isn’t stellar — just 640 x 480 for both the RGB and infrared sensors — so video imaging isn’t the highest quality. Still, the concept is sound and as improved sensors at lower costs appear, we could see vastly better pictures from a future Kinect or other similar sensors. We’re not yet at the point of using 3-D holograms in everyday communications, but as this concept shows, the future isn’t that far off.

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I had a demo of Fuze HD for iPad earlier this week, and have to say I’m pretty impressed, not just with the quality of the video — it shoots and displays 1080p HD video — but also the number of collaboration tools that are included. The app allows multiparty chat with up to 10 participants, as well as interoperability with a number of different high-end telepresence systems, ensuring that users can connect with colleagues and partners regardless of the hardware they use. It also gives them the option to record, display and share video directly from the tablet.

In addition to screen and video sharing, there’s also a ton of collaboration features built in, with users able to share documents and annotate them in real-time. FuzeBox has even built a touch-based laser pointer into the app so that users can highlight images or documents that they’re sharing.

The new display enables Retina-quality images and video, but Fuze for iPad HD also gets a speed boost from the new iPad’s 4G LTE connectivity. Users can download content about 10 times faster than before if they used cellular service, with uploads happening at twice the previous speeds over 3G. Latency has also been hugely reduced — it’s down by 50 percent, according to FuzeBox. That’ll ensure that video remains synced between users, which is ultra-important for video conferencing and collaboration.

With a new UI, FuzeBox has also increased language support on the iPad app, and now offers English, Chinese, Japanese, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Korean, Russian and Spanish. That’s important, as its user base is increasingly international: FuzeBox says it now hosts 76,000 meetings a day in 122 different countries.

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Where we are now

The combination of low price, increased functionality and the HD upgrade cycle have spurred consumers to adopt HDTVs en masse. According to recent research from Leichtman Research Group, about 70 percent of Americans now have at least one HDTV — up from 17 percent five years ago. Moreover, a number of those consumers already have multiple HDTVs, with about half of all HDTV households owning two or more.

I personally think that’s a trend set to continue, but not everyone agreed. In fact, I received a fair amount of criticism in the comments on the original post, as well as on Twitter and on other sites. (Check out Alexis Madrigal’s “The New Laws of TV Upgrading” for a pretty complete counter to that original post.)

The key argument against seems to go like this: Consumers bought a bunch of HDTVs over the past five years to take advantage of a noticeable difference between SD and HD feeds of their favorite content. But now that they’ve got the right-sized pane of glass for their living rooms capable of displaying HD video, there’s little reason for them to go out and buy a new TV. In other words, the HD revolution is nearly over.

The dumb smart TVs of CES

The counter-argument is that there will soon be a new revolution of smart TVs to pick up after the HDTV craze has worn off. And after attending the Consumer Electronics Show last week and seeing all the hot new HDTVs, 3-D TVs and Smart TVs available, I’m even more convinced consumers will soon be buying new TVs in increasingly shorter periods of time. But it’s not because I believe this year’s TVs are such a huge step above last year’s TVs that consumers will want to run out and get them.

In fact, just the opposite is true. This was illustrated in a dinner I was having with a few other journalists and executives Wednesday night when one of them asked what TV I would buy, of everything I saw on the show floor and in demos. The answer was easy. “None of them,” I said.

The reason is this: there are better things to come. There’s a huge opportunity for real innovation on the TV that’s gone completely untapped. But I have a feeling that’s going to change, and that change is going to come sooner than most think. Until it does, I’m sitting on the sidelines.

Where are the killer apps?

The killer app for most smart TVs today is Netflix. Pretty soon, pay TV operators like Comcast and Time Warner Cable and Verizon will make their services available as well. And HBO has some pretty ambitious plans to bring its authenticated on-demand service to connected devices.

But in each case, what we’re really talking about is making more TV available on your smart TV, but delivering it over the Internet. Think about that for a second: The main reason for most consumers to buy a smart TV today is to gain access to more of the same stuff that they already watch through cable.

And that gets to the heart of why I believe we’re on the cusp of another huge upgrade cycle. Today’s TVs are not much smarter than they were a year ago, or even two or three years ago. And that’s why everyone who already bought a shiny new HDTV set or even a first-generation “smart” TV will soon be in the market for a TV with some actual smarts built-in.

Real innovation is yet to come

Think about all the things that you could do with a truly smart TV that haven’t been enabled yet:

• HDTVs with cameras built-in could enable viewers to video chat with friends while watching a TV show together on the big screen. You know, real social viewing.
• Smart TVs could provide personalization of content and easier discovery of your favorite shows. As creepy as it may seem, facial recognition — like that enabled by Microsoft Kinect and shown off by Samsung at CES — could finally break down household usage and target TV programming based on who’s watching the box at any given time.
• Sports broadcasters could overlay real-time stats on a sidebar that runs alongside a football matchup, or provide a synchronized experience with a second-screen tablet or mobile app. Viewers could get fantasy updates or manage their teams in real-time from those apps.
• Networks could provide additional features — director commentary, behind-the-scenes footage, additional information about actors and scenes, etc. — into apps and make them available on TVs and other screens. (I’m thinking of extending HBO Go’s Game of Thrones interactive features, which had only been available when streaming in the web browser, and bringing them directly to the TV.)
• TV apps could provide real-time polling for competitive reality shows, replacing text messaging and Twitter counts. How many Google TVs do you think would sell if you could vote for your favorite American Idol directly from an app while watching the show live?
• For the enterprise, connected TV apps could provide new levels of collaboration and video conferencing tools, without the need to hook into expensive proprietary systems.

Of course, there are a number of technology companies looking to enable these types of features, but very few implementations have actually come to market, and none of them are mainstream. The important thing here is that the software is becoming more capable and powerful much more quickly than the hardware is changing. That means that the next wave of TV buying won’t be driven by screen resolution, refresh rate, screen size or the like, but by the power of the apps available on the TV platform.

Looking to mobile for clues

It wasn’t too long ago that the killer app on mobile handsets was email. A user might have upgraded when his two-year contract was up to get a phone with a camera, or maybe not. Mobile web was a joke.

And then the iPhone came along and people realized the opportunity that was available through an open apps ecosystem that allowed developers to create new experiences that were previously unheard of on the TV.

Anyone who’s looked at connected TVs today and decided that there’ll be no reason to upgrade in three years hasn’t considered the possibility of future apps or what sort of change is in store. The next generation of connected TVs won’t just be panes of glass that you watch Netflix on. They’ll be smart devices will full-on interactive components that will fundamentally change the way we engage with TV programming and with each other. And when that happens over the next few years, CE makers will be giving consumers a real reason to buy another new TV.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Sugar Pond.

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