Google offers live video chats on range of topics with new service

Video Conferencing through the Internet will be interesting but challenging.

I guess a video conferencing server will be provisioned and participants of the video session will have to book a 2 party or multi-party conference through the video server.

Multicast protocol (such as PIM-Sparse mode, PIM-Dense mode, DVMRP, IGMP, IGMP snooping) will be the most ideal protocol for video conferencing – so as not to strain the video server. But over the Internet, not possible to configure IP multicast in the router and network switches. Thus likely for unicast to be used – that will strain the video server.

Next challenge is that for a good quality video conferencing session – it is jitter-sensitive, latency-sensitive, delay-sensitive. Any delay in the video-conferencing session will means bad quality video and voice – leading to problem in good quality video conferencing session. Quality of services (QoS) that need to be configured hop-by-hop in all the network devices in the Internet is not possible.

Also, video conferencing session will need to support protocol such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) or H.323 protocols.