Vidyo, Inc. and Internet2, a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions, today announced a low-cost, subscription-based video communications offering for all Internet2 university members and thousands of public K-12 schools in the United States. K-12 schools will be able to participate through Internet2 NET+ regional partner. The service is expected to be available for early adopter enrollment in May.
The Vidyo-based service will be part of Internet2’s NET+ Services and will provide member institutions and other higher education and K-12 educational communities with a means to easily connect with affordable, high quality visual communication and collaboration across all institutions. Internet2 has partnered with ID Solutions, a global visual communications solutions provider, to deploy and host the service.
“Simple, high performance, personalized video based interactions have long been a goal for the education community. The Internet2 NET+ Vidyo service will enable participating institutions to work in simple, effective and collaborative manner,” said Shelton Waggener, Internet2 senior vice president. “As higher education evolves, so must the technology that we use to work together. Our community needs solutions that can be applied across and shared by all of our university, K-12 and affiliate members. We are extremely pleased by the results that were achieved via the partnership to tailor the solution with Arizona State, Emory and Northwestern Universities. We’re excited to offer this to all Internet2 university members and other institutions.”
“We’ve used Vidyo products and technology at Arizona State University for the past few years, and we continue to see a significant increase in the number of downloads of the Vidyo client; over 2,000, which is double from this time last year – just from ‘word of mouth’,” said Gordon Wishon, Arizona State University’s chief information officer. “We sponsored Vidyo as a NET+ Service for the very reasons that make us champions of this video communications solution. We needed something very flexible, portable and high quality, even under the worst bandwidth conditions. We’ve pushed Vidyo to the edge many times and its performance has been outstanding under the most extreme circumstances.”
Vidyo was recently the recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s 2013 Video Conferencing Technology Leadership Award after a thorough review and evaluation of the top three vendors in the global video conferencing market. Frost & Sullivan’s “Best Practices Research Report” details the evaluation process and analysis that determined the winning recipient and states that “Vidyo’s market leading innovations continue to demonstrate its technology lead and commitment to make video conferencing a ubiquitous technology.”
“Vidyo’s scalable, extremely accessible high-quality solution is priced at pennies per minute, enabling a whole new range of unique uses and applications that were never before available,” said Dr. Amnon Gavish, senior VP, vertical solutions, Vidyo. “The rapidly growing number of universities using our products and the rate of adoption – can attest to Vidyo’s high quality, performance and affordability. Just look at how Vidyo usage is spreading and increasing virally throughout the ASU community and imagine thousands of institutions having access to this service! We will be addressing millions of users. This is an enormous boon to the academic world.”
Users will be able to access the new Internet2 NET+ Vidyo service on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Linux platforms from a broad range of desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, as well as legacy H.323 and SIP devices. It is expected that the service will greatly enhance communication and collaboration between faculty, administration, classrooms, researchers and students at Internet2 affiliated institutions and businesses. Some of the anticipated use scenarios are: research collaboration, virtual classrooms, K-12 outreach, HIPAA-compliant telemedicine and encrypted DOD communications for particularly sensitive environments, and communication between non-university affiliates and partners.
Interested institutions can email netplus@internet2.edu to register for the Internet2 NET+ Vidyo service or visit para saber más.
