Vidyo

Vidyo, Inc.

Type	Private (venture funded)
Industry	Video Communications, Telepresence, Videoconferencing, Unified Communications, Platform as a Service
Founded	2005; 12 years ago (2005)
Headquarters	Hackensack, New Jersey
Key people	Eran Westman (CEO), Dr. Alex Eleftheriadis (Chief Scientist & Co-Founder), Avery More (Chairman, Co-Founder), Ofer Shapiro (Vice-Chairman, Co-Founder)
Products	Personal Telepresence systems, embedded video communications, videoconferencing endpoints & infrastructure, video chat, cloud services and APIs, CPaaS, technology licensing
Number of employees	300+
Website	www.vidyo.com

Vidyo, Inc. is a privately held, venture-funded company that provides software-based collaboration technology and product-based visual communication solutions. The company’s VidyoConferencing solutions are the first in the videoconferencing industry to take advantage of the H.264 standard for video compression, Scalable Video Coding (SVC).

Vidyo’s implementation of this technology enables high definition, low-latency, error resilient, multipoint video communication to both desktop and room system end points across general purpose IP networks.

Vidyo is well known for its implementation in Gmail's video and phone calls. Vidyo is being used for Hangouts feature.

Vidyo was born of Ofer Shapiro’s dissatisfaction with the complexity and limitations inherent in traditional video conferencing over IP networks. Shapiro spent eight years at Radvision, where he was responsible for the development of the first IP video conferencing bridge and programmable gatekeeper technology. After leaving Radvision in early 2004, he spent some time thinking about how video conferencing networks could be improved. Packet loss and latency that accompanies general purpose IP networks posed significant challenges to the existing systems. Costly dedicated networks and expensive Multipoint Control Units (MCU), which exacerbated delay due to transcoding or forced all endpoints to conform to the least common denominator endpoint quality, were the only solutions the industry had to offer at that time. He realized that to take advantage of state of the art H.264 compression technology, the fundamental technology behind video conferencing systems had to change and a new system design was required. Mr. Shapiro’s efforts resulted in a paradigm shift for the video conferencing industry - a new system architecture. The solution was based upon Scalable Video Coding (SVC) which allowed for error resiliency which was absent in monolithic encoding schemes that were common throughout the industry. Implementation of SVC for only some system components offered little value. The full benefit of SVC required re-designing both the endpoint (client) and MCU (server), a costly and time consuming proposition for incumbent providers of video conferencing systems. Unencumbered by a legacy product line, Mr. Shapiro took his ideas and developed a new architecture in which the MCU was replaced with a low cost router and all of the encoding and decoding was done at the end points.