Avistar (News - Alert) Communications Corporation, a provider of video conferencing solutions, announced it has expanded its conferencing and collaboration solution, Avistar C3 (News - Alert) Conference with cloud-ready, HD-quality, multiparty videoconferencing at a fraction of the cost of similarly sized hardware-based multipoint control units (MCU).

The company claims Avistar C3 Conference is the “industry's only all-software, enterprise-class multiparty video conferencing platform that seamlessly interoperates with standards-based room systems and desktops.” The service can be scaled to support the needs of large enterprise deployments, cloud providers and technology partners.

Avistar C3 Conference now includes critical multiparty videoconferencing features such as transcoding and transrating for each participant in every conference. The service can be deployed on premise or via the cloud. With virtually unlimited conferencing scalability capabilities, Avistar C3 dramatically lowers the cost of multiparty videoconferencing on the desktop, across conference room solutions and out to leading unified communications solutions.

At a recent benchmark study, Avistar C3 Conference recently delivered 32-port, HD-quality, multiparty videoconferencing for a list price of $1,750 per port including the cost of all software licensing and hardware. Avistar competitors' prices range in cost from $4,000 to $7,000 per port for similar performance and features (including software and hardware), according to company officials.

"This breakthrough in multiparty video conferencing processing, price performance and cloud enablement has largely been accomplished by the optimization of the Avistar C3 Conference media processing, the ability to use multiple servers to create a virtual single MCU and the continued performance improvements of off-the-shelf, standards- based server hardware,” said Stephen Epstein (News - Alert), chief marketing officer, Avistar, in a statement.

“Our partners and clients can now deliver on-premise or on-demand multiparty videoconferencing capabilities to extremely large user and client bases, at a price point that historically was not achievable," Epstein added.

With this highly competitive Avistar C3 Conference video conferencing offer, Avistar has set a new milestone for the video conferencing industry as other MCU manufacturers will be forced to rethink their MCU strategies to remain competitive, Epstein added.

In a similar industry development recently, BT (News - Alert) Conferencing has announced that it will be upgrading its hosted video conferencing solutions to include a broader range of previously unsupported protocols and endpoints. The upgrade will allow those using the solution to more effective participate in global video conferencing campaigns.