Partners Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp have shown the first fruits of their agreement to work together on Intenet video, voice and data communications standards by pairing Microsoft’s newly announced NetMeeting 2.0 beta software with Intel’s Internet Phone beta applet. NetMeeting 2.0, available free from Microsoft’s Web site, builds on Microsoft’s original Netmeeting product, a real-time communication client that allowed two users to share data over the Internet using standards-based multipoint data conferencing. The new version adds support for the International Telecommunications Union’s ITU H.323 audio conferencing standard, and runs on Windows 95 or Windows NT. The work was done jointly by Microsoft and Intel, which means that it is interoperable with Intel’s Internet Phone beta applet, allowing users of each beta offering to communicate with each other. According to Intel vice president Pat Geisinger this is the first time that users of two Internet ‘phone applications can find, click and connect to each other. The proposed open platform that the two are proposing, with backing from the International Mutimedia Teleconferencing Association, includes the H.323 standard, and RTP/RTCP and RSVP specifications. Intel spokesman Rick Yeomans said that Intel was still looking at Progressive Networks’ RTSP Real Time Streaming Protocol submitted to the Internet Engineering task Force earlier this week (CI No 3,021). We don’t have a position on that yet, he said.
