In our report, The Perfect Storm: Why Video Conferencing Will Dominate Business Communications, we discussed several important reasons why video conferencing will finally grow outside the niche it exists today in the pantheon of business communications. Here's one more reason.
People can and do rollout video conferencing services over IP in a way that requires no intermediate network (other than the Internet) to internetwork from endpoint to endpoint and network to network. This is something that IP PBXes and VoIP could do, but typically don't. Most VoIP implementations use VoIP in the LAN, the local area, and terminate every outbound call on the IP-to-PSTN gateway interface.
Since the VoIP implementation does not generally facilitate an IP-all-the-way end-to-end communication, but video does, video will be higher quality audio (and video of course) and more easily deployed for inter-company services without the PSTN than others.
