f13.net

We have a decent size public meeting/board room that can hold around 50 spectators, 12 seats wired for a mic, a podium with a mic, 2 projectors, a sound/video booth and 3 ptz cameras.  This room is shared for the entire building (12 agencies maybe) and we want the ability to allow for board members/participants to join in remotely.

I thikn we need something that can handle 12 participants and fully record/broadcast the session.  Maybe half of the board members would be in the same conference room but I was sort of thinking it might be best for each of them to have their own cameras for more equal representation (so it would be like they were remoting in while sitting right there).  After an afternoon googling I have come up with ooVoo (12 streams), Vidtel (12 streams), Vidyo (12 streams), gotomeeting HD faces (12 streams/6 visible) and possibly google hangouts (10 streams?) as low cost solutions. 

I am not certain we need a low cost solution but I am unclear on what the next step up is, maybe polycom?

I don't know any of the others, and I'm not sure how well it would scale to a bigger room, but Google Hangouts are the shit. Turns out you haven't had a real video conference until all your bosses start using the face-tracking technology to give themselves silly beards and hats.  :awesome_for_real:

An organization I've done some work for uses WebEx.  I'm not sure if it fits all your needs, but it seemed to work well for our purposes.

Used that twice for one of the study's I am on. Pretty lag free and clear, but the other sites were in Philly and Louisville with me in Pittsburgh - not a whole lotta hops there.

I would think that all of our participants will be in the Texas.

We've used WebEx and moved to Fuze box recently.  Fuze being cheaper but also having remarkably better quality on the conference side than WebEx had.  https://www.fuzebox.com/

Never used them for vid conference myself, but might be worth checking out.

If you need something really easy to use (with a slick UI); somewhat open source, fast and high-quality (also usable on mobile) you could try seeVogh (which used to be EVO).  It's what CERN and other big research institutions use; was once free, but now it costs.  I actually met one of their managers to go over trying to get my school's platform to switch to it; helluva nice guy.  I think it ends up costing around the standard price of $8/head/month with at least 20 streams; they can scale it however you want of course, as well as come up with whatever solution you might need for your specific uses.

PM me and I can get you a direct contact.

This was one of my favorite moments in a recent pitch by a late-to-the-party company trying to get into the MOOC market with anyone who isn't already signed up with EdX, Coursera, Udacity, or any of the name operators. I ask, "So, you want a revenue share from a per-course slice of the tuition students pay, and you help, a bit, with designing online courses. What else do you bring to the table?"

Company salesperson: "We have a special webconferencing software we have built up from scratch, you couldn't teach online without it!"

Me: "There's at least three cheap, fairly good, somewhat open-source webconferencing packages out there that we could just pick up and use without much fuss."

Salesperson: "Nuh-uh, there is no such thing. It is unpossible!"

Me, turning around my iPad: "BigBlueButton. (http://www.bigbluebutton.org/). Fuzebox. Google Hangouts."

Salesperson: "Uh, um, some of those cost money. And they aren't specifically adapted for teaching courses....and...oh, that Blue thing is, isn't it."
...
"Anyway, we could give you technical support! As part of the deal!"


--------

Now I will say that BigBlueButton is still pretty rough, or was the last time I tried using it. I've been meaning to look at SeeVogh, that seems cool. Hangouts definitely doesn't scale above a very small number. Some of the older webconferencing platforms out there have terrible UI or bad functionality--I was in a webinar once that used GoToMeeting and that was terrible.

I kind of hate the amount of shadiness brought to the table when a large portion of the solution providers heavily stress reseller programs (especially if they allow you to rebrand their solution).

I've used several of these, but since I work in IT we don't use the thing where it shows your face to everyone.  Desktop/application window sharing is cool.  Letting people see that you haven't brushed your hair or shaved in a few days is not cool.  Even less cool is letting people see that you are actually surfing F13 on your other PC instead of listening.

GoToMeeting is HORRIBLE from a user standpoint.  I think I had to install the damn software 3 times before it finally let me in to the last presentation to use it.

Another one worth looking at: http://bluejeans.com/

Yeah, another bullshit start-up that signed up student reps like an Amway thing was trying to sell a bare-bones Drupal online course thing as some super-exotic hand-coded ultra kung-fu all-in-one solution, and man, they were not happy with me and one other guy at their presentation when we were like, "that's a fucking Drupal page where 95% of it could be done by somebody's grandmother at Drupal Gardens in an afternoon."

Webex works, or you could get a dedicated Polycom unit.