Sightspeed's New Release

Not a new player in PC-based IP Videoconferencing, Sightspeed has been building proprietary software for VoIP and Video for more than 5 years (a lifetime in this industry).

The fresh and new CEO – Peter Csathy was kind enough to comp me a Premium account so I could play with it a bit.

First impression was good, easy to download and get setup. Since they mention in their PR that they are leveraging Web 2.0 I would imagine they are using Ajax, it looks good.

This new release is much more esthetically pleasing than past apps and includes some great tools for creating html links from the video/voice mail recordings as well.

The video clip can only be 60 seconds long and only as a local recording, I can’t record a video conference that I am part of. Not sure if this is by design but if we look at the flickr model we get plenty of storage space for free and Counterpath offers a SIP Voice/Video softphone that records all media to AVI.

In Sightspeed 4.5, we can extract the MPG link from the webpage that follows the recording which is great but I should not have to go through that much hassle to find it. I would also like it if the link were made available in MP4 and WMV and include the media extension in the html link so that my media enclosures will pick it up.

Skype got picked up by the bloggers because it was the easiest app to use that was freely available, it’s still not easy enough.

I should also be able to upload my own MP4, MOV, WMV etc. Add some mobile integration not unlike shoZu and multi-party conferencing recording capabilities for the Desktop client and we would now have a very useful tool for citizen journalists worldwide.

I would seem that most apps like this are targeting an audience that is less technically inclined but I think that with a little more work they could also carve out a pretty cool niche in a market that needs tools like this.

Alec has some comments as well.