If you want a dedicated circuit, then of course it's going to be expensive. But there's really no reason to spend that much money on an encoder, unless you're doing something like integrating an ASIC [1].
> Video chat systems/protocols look to be somewhat stagnate/immature
Eh. There's a lot of work being done with WebRTC, but I'm not going to say that's significantly advancing the state of the art with respect to video transport -- SDP, RTP, DTLS have all coexisted for a long time.
What has happened, though, is that by abstracting away media handling, the traditional "control plane" is being disintermediated. As a result, we're seeing 1) a lot of reinventing the wheel, and 2) more siloing among service providers. Both lead to feature fragmentation among providers and slows the progress of video-based services.
While I'll be the first to admit that SIP (and XMPP and H.323 and BFCP and ...) is rather too involved to be used outside a fully federated telecom environment, it's a bit of a shame that a nicer signaling protocol hasn't really gained any traction in in its stead. Having most services work from a higher level baseline could reduce feature fragmentation and speed up the perceived progress of video services. And hopefully encourage more interoperability, but that's probably a lost cause...
[1] I'm aware there are encoders that cost in that range, eg VBrick, and it's crazy -- you don't need to spend that much for video conferencing.
> Video chat systems/protocols look to be somewhat stagnate/immature
Eh. There's a lot of work being done with WebRTC, but I'm not going to say that's significantly advancing the state of the art with respect to video transport -- SDP, RTP, DTLS have all coexisted for a long time.
What has happened, though, is that by abstracting away media handling, the traditional "control plane" is being disintermediated. As a result, we're seeing 1) a lot of reinventing the wheel, and 2) more siloing among service providers. Both lead to feature fragmentation among providers and slows the progress of video-based services.
While I'll be the first to admit that SIP (and XMPP and H.323 and BFCP and ...) is rather too involved to be used outside a fully federated telecom environment, it's a bit of a shame that a nicer signaling protocol hasn't really gained any traction in in its stead. Having most services work from a higher level baseline could reduce feature fragmentation and speed up the perceived progress of video services. And hopefully encourage more interoperability, but that's probably a lost cause...
[1] I'm aware there are encoders that cost in that range, eg VBrick, and it's crazy -- you don't need to spend that much for video conferencing.