You know that commercial in which a humanitarian in a developing country visits his proud family back home through a high-definition, big screen video conference? Looks pretty slick, right? Everyone should have such a device in his or her home or place of work, right? Well, here’s what they don’t tell you–it’s not cheap (as in, I did a little research and it looks like each unit starts around $15,000) and uses more bandwidth than you and I combined have coming into our homes. Well, nuts.

Low-resolution video conferencing via computers has been around for some time now, but as anyone who took part in our great Marratech experiment a couple of years can tell you, setup is no cakewalk. Even today, I was trying to connect with someone using iChat AV–arguably the most easy-to-use video conferencing tool out there–but vague connection errors kept me from my call. This is frustrating enough as someone who halfway knows what he’s doing–I can only imagine how it feels for someone who’s trying out video conferencing for the first time.

That might be about to change, though. Two companies have announced plans to develop a high-definition video conferencing device that connects to a flat panel TV and allows people to interact over a standard consumer-level Internet connection. Just plug it into your TV and network connection and start talking. There’s still quite a bit we don’t know about this new product, such as price and compatibility with other conferencing devices, but on the surface this could be the magic video conferencing device we’ve been waiting for.

Tags: conferencing, video