Cisco Telepresence: Coming to a home near you (someday)

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers can barely keep quiet about the company's Telepresence video effort, a high-end video conferencing system, but on the company's fourth quarter conference call he was especially chatty. The big takeaways: Telepresence will be a $1 billion business within five years and it will be coming to a home near you.

It was obvious that Chambers' comments about Telepresence went beyond his usual earnings spiel. He offered some revenue details and some insight to how the product plans to evolve from a pricey enterprise system to a consumer application.

Here was Chambers first consumer use case on the company's conference call:

Video is clearly the killer out here and when you think about the loads currently going on networks, these are largely downloads that are occurring today or one person to one person. If you begin to take concepts like TelePresence, where you have 10 different locations into a single meeting, which I do pretty regularly now, as an example and you begin to think about that occurring not only in the area of business, but also to the home, where you watch sporting events together from your home, across multiple sites and do reruns etcetera, you begin to see where our view of at least what we believe will be in loads on the networks.

And then Chambers mentioned this:

If it is one product that really catches peoples imagination, its TelePresence and its speaks to the role of video and communications. 60% of the way you communicated is non-verbal, its about video and that loads the heck out of networks and you are just beginning to see what's capable with TelePresence and so today well, you see the typical ones but probably each of you have seen, you have not seen our movement into the home, which we clearly are going to do.

How can Cisco take a product that runs thousands of dollars--but is worth it to an enterprise because you easily save on travel--and turn it into a consumer offering that would have to be cheap? There's a question Chambers didn't get into, but if I were to guess I'd bet that Telepresence will wind up in a Scientific Atlanta set-top box or Linksys router. Cisco is well entrenched in your living room and home office already and the set-top box may be the best route to making Telepresence a consumer reality. Chambers specifically mentioned watching sporting events with your Telepresence pals. That statement hints at a TV being nearby. Integrate the projector on the set-top box, have cable companies subsidize it a bit and you could have mass adoption pretty quickly.