I believe we’re moving to the day when they all will be. The exceptional clarity and detail of sound from the Dolby Conference Phone combined with Highfive’s high-quality video and other collaboration tools means that you can have an easy exchange of ideas and get things done.Įvery video conference should be a great experience. I think the combination of Dolby Voice and the Dolby Conference Phone with the Highfive collaboration system will show the full potential that video conferencing has. And the system is affordable enough for every conference room, not just the boardroom. Their combination of hardware and smart cloud software make setting up video conferencing so easy you can do it without IT’s help.

Highfive is a true innovator in meeting room collaboration. The effect is that you can have natural and productive meetings because everyone feels like they’re in the room. Everyone hears each person on the call from a distinct virtual location, so it’s easy to identify who’s speaking and follow the conversation. With Dolby Voice and the Dolby Conference Phone, we’ve used our audio expertise to deliver truly clear, clean sound and reduce noises like traffic and background conversations. That’s why I’m excited that Highfive, one of the most innovative companies offering video conferencing solutions, and Dolby are partnering to bring Dolby Voice and Dolby Conference Phones to every Highfive conference room. In fact, it may just make it more frustrating – you can see that your boss is talking, but you can’t make out what she’s saying. No matter how good the video is, it won’t help a conference with muddy, incomprehensible sound. If you can’t hear and understand your colleagues, your meeting is time wasted.

As great as video conferences are for allowing you to see your colleagues and collaborate visually, it’s still true that the majority of information is being transmitted through sound. But too often they don’t understand what delivering great audio to support a business meeting really means. They pay lip service to the idea of providing great audio for meetings, marketing the benefits of “HD Audio” or other buzzwords. Many companies have been focused on improving the video quality of their systems, but they haven’t put enough effort into improving their sound. To my mind, there’s a more fundamental problem that many video conferencing companies overlook: sound quality. And setting up a system can be needlessly complicated. The hardware is often quite expensive – too expensive to be used throughout a company. In recent years, video image quality has improved as bandwidth has gotten faster and the hardware has gotten better. Given how good a video conference can be, what’s holding the technology back? So it was a little surprising to see recent data from Wainhouse Research showing that the use of video conferencing is flat or up only marginally. And I like that when I get an idea that’s best expressed visually, I can quickly draw it on a sheet of paper or a whiteboard and everyone can see it. I like the fact that you can get visual cues – those little grins or furrowed brows – that tell you how remote participants are feeling about the direction of a meeting.

I left my meeting excited, thinking that I wanted to do more remote conversations through video conferencing. It was as if I was in the same room with colleagues hundreds of miles away. The video was sharp, there was no lag, and everyone could understand one another. I recently had a fantastic experience in a video conference.

Highfive videoconferencing