Quality is not necessarily an incremental item

Often, when we think of increases in quality (whether that is software, video, errors, etc), we think that’s an incremental gain.  Meaning, quality is a continuous curve that additional effort or planning will get you more of.

In the case of online live video, that’s not entirely true.  There is a fairly important jump between the quality of encoding within a software context (eg: on your laptop) and with the addition of hardware processing (eg: with rVibe’s appliance).  To get from decent, but not fantastic quality to really good or great quality, it requires a substantial change in process and technology.  Of course, than may change in years to come, but for now it’s true.

And this is the rub:  not everything can be done with moderate quality video.  For example – if you need to see something on screen that has a lot of detail and motion – like a medical device, or a computing part, or surgery, you have to have hardware based encoding to have it be effective. Otherwise it’s just lost in the mush of lower processing based live video – and that is plain yucky.

Quality is not always incremental – sometimes it has to be a certain level to just plain work – and sometimes, achieving that level takes a big step in technology.

Which of course, is where rVibe comes in.