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Video conferencing phone booth [Telecom]

I recently posted on the above topic; got some responses, mostly suggesting (and praising) Skype; and a friendly email from "Harry" offering to sell me some video conferencing hardware he'd once acquired.

Thanks for replies; Skype sounds good; but at the minute I'm having all I can do IT-wise just to get all my heritage Mac apps running properly following an upgrade to Snow Leopard. I just want to sit down and begin seeing and talking to some people on the opposite coast, for about an hour, right now, without having to fly there, and without having to install and learn still another Mac app (especially when networking is involved).

So, here's the reply I've sent Harry, for whatever interest it may be to any of you (especially any of you in the Tahoe area, who have that renowned California entrepreneurial spirit . . . )

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ Thanks, Harry -- but what i want to do is:

  • Walk into a functioning "video conferencing phone booth" (should I trademark that name?) here at Lake Tahoe, and hand the operator of the facility a credit card;

  • Sit down at a desk which has a nice big LCD monitor on it, decent audio in the room, and an independent WiFi hot spot so I can get connected with the Internet with my laptop separately from any other connections (plus maybe a cheapo USB printer);

  • Have someone knowledgeable (e.g., the owner/operator of this little facility) establish the audio-video connection to the East Coast firm, with whatever facilities it has, and start the meter running once that connection is made;

and then once the conference is over, an hour or so later, have the operator run a charge on my card for, say, $150/hour, with a $150 minimum and maybe a minor charge for pages printed.

(Maybe also an option to VCR my whole session and hand me a DVD at the end -- appropriately charged for, of course.)

Maybe you'd want to get back in business? -- I really think something like this could find a market, in this area and elsewhere.

--AES

Reply to
AES
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I'd suggest finding a high school kid and pay him or her $20 to set up Skype on your laptop. Really.

Having done the video studio thing, I can tell you there is no video phone booth business because Skype et all have killed it. Unless you lived next door to the studio, you'd probably spend more time driving there than it'd take to download and set up Skype, particularly on a Macbook which has the audio and video hardware already installed and configured.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

Twenty years ago there were a lot of places where you could do this. Many business incubators, PBS stations and the like had small conference rooms equipped with the Tandberg teleconferencing systems. The organization I work for had one of them at each one of its sites.

Skype and other similar services have killed that. They are so cheap and so convenient that everybody uses them and the fancy teleconferencing centers are dead now.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Kinkos, as in the copying and business service chain, offered video conferencing between many of their storefronts into the late 1990s. A friend and I queried their rates which were in the hundreds per hour, and decided against it...

Reply to
danny burstein

Holiday Inn built a teleconferencing network known as "Hi-Net" during the

1980s. According the New York Magazine, Hi-Net was once largest privately-owned satellite network in the Continental United States.
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A former friend of mine, Richard Gall (now unfortunately deceased), was a technical consultant for Hi-Net. He once described the system to me in some detail. It carried teleconferencing signals and HBO (or Showtime) by C-Band (4-GHz downlink) satellites to fixed TVROs located at Holiday Inn hotel properties.

A few of the hotels that wanted to subscribe to Hi-Net were unable do so for a variety of reasons -- signal blockage from nearby buildings, zoning requirements, or interference from existing ground-based microwave links in the 4-GHz band. In such cases, Gall's company was contracted to design and install point-to-point microwave links to deliver the signals from one hotel to another.

I happened to be involved in a repair job at one of these point-to-point networks. It involved two microwave links in the Los Angeles area:

- Holiday Inn/LAX to Holiday Inn/Brentwood.

- Holiday Inn/Brentwood to Holiday Inn/Santa Monica

All three Inns subscribed to Hi-Net, but only the Inn at LAX had a suitable site for a TVRO. Both the Brentwood and Santa Monica properties wanted to receive the signal, but it was not possible to establish a microwave link from LAX directly to Santa Monica due to signal blockage, so the signal went first to Brentwood, thence to Santa Monica. The roof of the Brentwood building was well suited for this: a multistory building in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. The two antennas (one receive and one transmit) were mounted on the elevator penthouse.

Hi-Net didn't last long. Higher-power satellites using Ku-band transmission permitted the use of small rooftop antennas at much lower cost. By the mid-1990s, Hi-Net had ceased to exist, and all the old point-to-point microwave systems were abandoned in place. The LAX/Brentwood/Santa Monica system is long gone now, but believe it or not, the two antennas on the penthouse of the Holiday Inn in Brentwood are still there. While writing this post, I tracked them down on Google maps, and there they are:

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Neal McLain

Reply to
Neal McLain
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We stayed at the Holiday Inn in Brentwood several years ago when most of the floor they assigned us to was under renovations--jack hammers and other power tools going all day. We were on vacation and intending to use the hotel for a base for points of interest in the LA area and often coming back during the day to rest or for other reasons.

We left after one or two days.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Reply to
Wes Leatherock

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