I’ve spent most of the last decade involved in remote collaboration as a tech support engineer for ednet, whose primary business model is real-time, remote audio collaboration via ISDN & IP for the advertising, post / ADR, and music markets. It's a high-end, niche business that works very well for studios needing what we like to call "CD-quality phone calls". During this time, my project studio has also needed to collaborate with other studios over long distances. Typically, I address this by primitive (fedexing or mailing CDs/ DVDs), or mid-tech (emailing .mp3s, FTP) means.
Unfortunately, these solutions are not suited to a real-time collaborative experience. Mail and Fedex obviously won’t work. ISDN and IP come close, but coding and transmission de ...