This week at Lotusphere I experienced Dolby's forthcoming audio conferencing solution firsthand. Dolby is applying its renowned signal processing technology along with a proprietary wideband audio codec to the audio conferencing market. This is the same technology the Dolby uses in its gaming solutions which are used by millions of users simultaneously.
A distinguishing feature of this technology is that it uses off the shelf servers, which gives Dolby the potential to completely disrupt the current audio conferencing bridging market. A single server can handle up to 2,500 users, and adding more users is simply a matter of provisioning additional servers. Clearly there must be some logic as to which server to host a conference on, but Dolby has that software.
The cost implications for conferencing service providers are enormous, with the possibility of an order of magnitude cost reduction in conferencing infrastructure costs. Dolby has not announced what it intends to charge for its solution.
The cost implications for conferencing service providers are enormous, with the possibility of an order of magnitude cost reduction in conferencing infrastructure costs. Dolby has not announced what it intends to charge for its solution.
In addition to providing a wideband audio experience, Dolby's solution provides spatial audio so that a participant can detect the location of the speaker, much like one would experience when sitting at a conference table. Dolby says that each talker is given a "unique space", allowing listeners to understand what is being said even if multiple people speak over one another. This is a very different mixing model than is traditionally done in audio conferencing bridges in which the bridge detects the loudest speakers and then mixes their voices together, which makes it much more difficult to understand when multiple people are speaking.
The noise cancellation in the system is outstanding. In the demo, one of the rooms had a noisy college basketball game displayed on a television set. Those on the far end listening to the call were unable to hear the basketball game at all.
If there's a fly in the ointment, it comes from the fact that participants require a stereo headset or stereo speakers in order to obtain all the benefits the Dolby's audio conferencing system can provide. Stereo audio is necessary to give the spatial orientation effect for locating the participants. It's not clear to me that users would be willing to buy a stereo headset to use this system. Most of the Bluetooth headsets in use today for telephones and mobile phones are mono only. A mono headset would still get the benefit of the noise cancellation and the wideband audio codec, but the spatial audio capability would not be present.
The demo we saw was using the regular IBM Sametime Connect client with the Dolby audio bridge simply replacing Sametime's own media server. The implication is that Dolby's audio solution can integrate in with other systems. There does need to be some type of a gateway function in order to convert the audio from codec embedded within standard SIP to Dolby's proprietary codec. PSTN users will be able to call in to the bridge through gateway provided by third parties.
Dolby intends to license the technology to conferencing service providers and others who will embed it in their own systems.
After participating in the demo, in order to get a true sense of how good the system actually is, I would need to have a setup in which I could hear side-by-side 1) a regular audio conference, 2) an audio conference using a different wideband codec, and 3) an audio conference using Dolby's technology.
I have heard some wideband audio that is very, very good; hence, to really judge how good Dolby’s audio is, I would need to hear it in side-by-side comparisons with these other options. That being said, my initial impressions are quite positive, and the audio conferencing market may be in for quite a shakeup given that Dolby has a reputation big enough and the resources required to get the product to market.
