Introducing Solstice Conference: Wireless Content Sharing and Video Conferencing (Part 4 of 4)

This post is the last in our four-part series exploring how organizations can solve the problem of mediocre and ineffective meetings by incorporating technology that enables a productive meeting experience for both in-room and remote participants.

In earlier posts, we examined how organizations have over-indexed on the remote use case, implementing room solutions that singularly focus on accommodating remote attendees by simply getting them into the meeting, but limit effective collaboration within those meetings. While video conferencing room systems are great for audio and video communication with remote users, they don’t do much to enable collaboration among the participants in the room. This remote-focused architecture hamstrings collaboration, ultimately sacrificing meeting engagement and productivity.

Traditional video conferencing room systems suffer from three key problems:

1. They are not agnostic, diluting user experience and ease of connection through single-vendor support.
2. They limit content sharing, decreasing engagement among both local and remote users.
3. They are too expensive, delivering a low-performance collaboration solution for high-dollar room and network costs.

Mersive is answering this crucial workplace need with Solstice Conference, which unifies video conferencing and in-room content sharing to provide the best of both worlds. Providing powerful content collaboration for onsite participants and agnostic conferencing support for remote users, Solstice Conference offers a room system alternative that is both flexible and cost effective.

Increased flexibility through agnostic conferencing support

One of the biggest issues with traditional room systems is that virtually all are developed in support of a single video conferencing service. While this may work well for internal meetings at organizations that have standardized their conferencing service, the rooms won’t support conferencing meetings hosted by outside parties using other services. This can be problematic for meetings with customers, partners, or vendors. While some room conferencing solutions do offer connectors for other conferencing services, these are often expensive add-on costs for a basic capability the room should natively support.

Users should be able to walk into a meeting space and connect to any video conferencing service. Solstice Conference provides agnostic video conferencing support for all major video conferencing services, providing flexibility without vendor lock-in. Anyone can easily host a video conference from their laptop while also incorporating room content, audio, and video. This increases the flexibility of the space while reducing the complexity of meetings with remote participants.

Traditional video conferencing room systems were designed to create a simple one-touch start experience, but the tradeoff was a loss of flexibility and agnosticism in order to achieve ease of use. But you don’t need to trade one for the other. Solstice Conference offers ease of use with one-step start and agnostic room support for any major conferencing service.

Solstice Conference integrates with the meeting host’s calendar to intelligently launch scheduled video conferences with a simple one-step start. Solstice also automatically bridges room peripherals – displays, cameras, microphones, soundbars, etc. – to the host’s laptop to stream directly to remote participants. All of this happens simultaneously for a seamless, one-step meeting start that follows the same simple workflow regardless of the conferencing system being used.

Making video conferencing more collaborative

So what does integration of wireless content sharing and video conferencing mean for collaboration? As mentioned throughout this series, video conferencing systems were fundamentally designed to support the remote use case. And, while they are great tools for supporting remote connectivity, they fall short in providing a robust platform that supports effective onsite collaboration.

Solstice Conference tackles this deficiency, optimizing for both high-quality content sharing and remote attendee participation by:

• Providing unlimited simultaneous content sharing. Video conferencing platforms limit dynamic collaboration through an architecture that allows for only one piece of content at a time. Solstice allows multiple onsite users to wirelessly share and control unlimited amounts of content to the room display simultaneously.
• Enabling more secure, high-performance content sharing. With video conferencing, every onsite participant must individually connect to the cloud conference in order to share content (otherwise known as “double join”). With Solstice Conference, only one in-room user – the host – is connected to the video conference. All other onsite participants share content via the local network, which is more secure and higher performance, which is particularly important for high-resolution imagery, 4k video streaming, and potentially sensitive information.
• Enhancing remote engagement. Solstice Conference extends the in-room content sharing and collaboration experience to remote users. Through a streamlined connection to the video conference and in-room AV peripherals, the onsite experience is virtualized, so remote participants can experience content-rich collaboration as if they were in the room.

A cost effective collaboration solution for every meeting space

Despite its enhanced capabilities compared to other video conferencing systems, Solstice Conference has a significantly lower subscription price point than most popular video conferencing room licenses on the market. Take Zoom Rooms, for example. Zoom Rooms, like other VCS, are designed for remote connection. Its cloud-based content sharing results in lower streaming quality and higher resource allocation for in-room sharing compared to Solstice, in addition to lacking Solstice’s robust content control features. Despite this, Solstice Conference is still less than half the cost of a yearly Zoom Rooms subscription price.

Using Solstice Conference reduces external bandwidth costs by smartly streaming all in-room content via the local network. As highlighted in the second post of our series, streaming content via video conferencing systems is much more expensive than Solstice. With conferencing room systems, content must make an expensive round-trip to the cloud each time a user shares, even when the participants are sitting in the same room as each other and the display they’re streaming to.

Solstice Conference delivers the value and virtual communication experience of a traditional room system at a fraction of the cost. Through intelligently leveraging host laptops and room system peripherals connected to the Solstice Pod, Solstice offers a complete, flexible, and cost-effective software-based room system. It can also be easily integrated with existing room systems by leveraging its OpenControl API and versatile I/O hub. This versatility makes it an ideal solution for every type of meeting space from large conference rooms to lounges and huddle spaces.

The power of content sharing with the reach of video conferencing

Meeting room technology is ripe for change. The contemporary meeting space will be shaped by seamless technology integrations that support both powerful in-room collaboration and the increasing trend toward remote work. While seemingly divergent objectives, organizations will need to implement meeting space technology that enables a productive meeting experience for both onsite and remote participants.

Solstice Conference sits at the intersection of these rapidly evolving workplace requirements, providing a solution to the pain points of traditional video conferencing room systems and the needs of the contemporary workplace.

• It eliminates vendor lock-in with agnostic video conferencing support for all major video conferencing services, reducing the complexity of connecting to remote attendees.
• It provides rich content-based collaboration for both onsite and remote teams, supporting high-performance, low-latency content sharing.
• And, finally, it is supported by a flexible platform that leverages the local network and in-room peripherals to deliver a cost effective room system experience at a fraction of the cost of traditional conferencing room systems.

By seamlessly unifying the onsite and remote meeting experience, Solstice Conference enables organizations to drive meeting engagement and results with intelligent, cost-effective technology that improves the value of their meeting spaces.

Learn more about Solstice Conference

Missed the first three posts in this 4 part series?