SightSpeed 3.0 rocks

By Jason Meserve, NetworkWorld.com, 11/24/04

Those following this space for the past year know that one of my favorite video products is SightSpeed Video Messenger. It's easy to use and firewall friendly. Now the company has shipped version 3.0 with some major improvements - including the ability to leave video messages for those away from their system and send video mail to non-SightSpeed users. There's also a multi-party function that can be used to bring up to four people into a single call. Also gone with version 3.0 is the Video Messenger name - the product is simply called "SightSpeed."

I fired up the new version last week and was impressed with it. The video mail feature is very easy to use. The only issue I ran into was my video camera was not sending video during two-way calls. SightSpeed tech support quickly remedied the problem though.

The company is clearly targeting the consumer market with the product, but it is definitely useful in a small/medium-sized business environment where workers may be geographically distributed. There are four pricing plans available ranging from free for basic service to professional ($54.95/month), which includes unlimited usage and 1000 video e-mails per month. All the plan pricing can be found here.

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Comments

Thanks for the review. You forgot to mention the unlimited free audio calling!

I agree with Jason's assessment. Seeing is believing.

I have been using SightSpeed since it was in beta. When the service was offered for a fee, I gladly paid $50 per month (the same service is now available for $5 per month). With this newest release, the guys at SightSpeed deliver a feature-rich videoconferencing program at a very low price.

First, let's talk about what makes SightSpeed different from the others in the web videoconferencing space. First, they don't rely on some of the prevalent videoconferencing codecs for their service. They built a codec from the ground up, and using a unique process they are able to rapidly encode and decode video data by eliminating the things that brain filters out, resulting in extremely low latency, while still supporting a crisp 30 frames per second.

Anyone who has talked on a cell phone understands what latency is --it is that annoying yet slight time delay that sometimes results in people talking over each other. Most videoconferencing systems --whether web or hardware-based introduce an amount of latency that makes natural dialog difficult. The latency is acceptable when a speaker is essentially "talking at" a group, but really becomes noticeable when people try to engage in a face-to-face meeting. Some videoconferencing systems introduce a tremendous amount of latency forcing participants to talk in what sounds like some sort of CB or NASA astronaut conversation.

What first struck me about SightSpeed was how fluid the video streams were and how natural the conversation could be. When I was on the road for work, I would call home and talk face to face with my wife as if we were in the same room. When talking with clients and partners in other countries, we could hold true, face-to-face meetings that really felt like meetings as opposed to phone calls. The time delay or latency is as good as a POTS (plain old telephone service) telephone (you can prove this by talking over the phone while watching the video in perfect synch -- the "SightSpeed Challenge," as they used to call it).

I felt that the 2.0 thru 2.5 versions of SightSpeed lacked some image crispness, while bringing dramatic improvements in audio. I could tell, however, that a lot was going on under the hood. I guess that the 2.x versions were the ugly adolescent phase for the service because I am now astounded at how well the mature SightSpeed 3.0 handles both audio and video -- while packaged in a more feature-rich offering..

However, despite the many new features, such as multi-party conferencing and video mail/answering machine service, the main selling point, for me, will always be the 30 fps streaming and the low-latency audio and video. If you always hoped for a day when high-quality videophone calls were possible, if you spend time away from your friends and family, or if you work from the road, SightSpeed is the best videoconferencing solution I've tried --and I've probably tried the whole lot of them.

SightSpeed is too good to use only for business communications (when you are not in the office, you usually are happy enough not to have it projected into your home office) and it may just be the service that democratizes high-quality videoconferencing for everyday people. They could do worse. After all, computers were also originally only used for business.

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