TelePresence

CNN viewers spooked by Cisco ad during flight 1549 coverage

You know how sometimes you’re watching TV and the commercials seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to the program… and you wonder if it was just coincidence, or some kind of prank on the part of the programmers?

In Cisco’s case, the coincidental placement of their TelePresence “Business Travel Without the Travel” commercial jarred viewers Thursday during CNN’s coverage of the crash landing of US Airways flight 1549. As reported by the L.A. Times Technology Blog, the commercial, which mocks airline safety instructions, aired right after real-life coverage of the crash. And viewers, along with Cisco, were a little freaked out:

“They go right from having some guy interviewed talking about the pilot saying, ‘Brace yourself,’ to a commercial being sarcastic about the emergency stuff. It creeped me out,” said Lauren de la Fuente, a marketing consultant from New York who was fixated on TV coverage of the crash. “I thought, ‘This is the most inappropriate commercial for the time.’ “

The ad has been pulled off the air, but you can still view it on YouTube, at least for now.

TelePresence, now yours for an hourly fee

Have you been eyeing Cisco’s TelePresence ever since Vice President Noah Daniels and Russian President Suvarov squared off over one in 24, Season 6?

Well now’s your chance to re-enact your favorite moments, as Cisco begins renting TelePresence rooms to the general public. There will be over 100 rooms to choose from by the end of 2009, Reuters reported, so you and your 24 play pals will have plenty of spaces to choose from, and price points vary from $299 to $899 depending on the size of the room.

Considering TelePresence rooms (and they really are whole rooms, with everything from the carpeting to the tables to the angle of the HD TV’s pre-determined) can run $300,000 to install, a few hundred dollars an hour isn’t a bad deal, particular if travel expenses can be cut down several thousand while big wigs meet virtually instead of globe-trotting around the world (it’s also easier on the environment). And while Cisco’s plans were fairly modest for deployments, focusing on the global 500, this could help push the technology out to a much broader base.

Cisco is also supposedly touting telepresence as an option to bring together people together for distance weddings and births, according to Network World’s Cisco Subnet, but I’m a wee bit skeptical this will develop into a serious market … Do people really want to give birth in a sterile business suite? Maybe one of the lower end, less “total” solutions is more feasible here, but we doubt a whole lot of wedding parties will want to cram into a suite in the Pierre Hotel, however seamless the experience.