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Viodi View Newsletter – August 9th, 2006
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SightSpeed: Read My Lips
By Ken Pyle, [email protected], Managing Editor, Viodi View
SightSpeed is a five year old company founded by a team from Cornell University with the idea of improving video conferencing. There first commercial product was released in August, 2003 and the product is currently in its fifth major release. With hundreds of thousands of subscribers and some large partners, such as Creative, SightSpeed is now well established. Like just about any PC-based VoIP providers today, customers can connect to the PSTN by pre-purchasing minutes.
Scott Lomand, the President of SightSpeed, suggested that quality is what differentiates their product from the likes of Yahoo!, Skype and MSN. They obtain this quality through; 1) a proprietary encoding process, 2) a monitoring process that continually measures the quality of the signal and adjusts the frame rate accordingly and 3) a method for ensuring low latency between the audio and video. And the latency measured on my phone call with Lomand proved to be in the 50 millisecond range. Lomand’s lips truly were synchronized to his voice, which is pretty amazing for a PC-based product.
They are interoperating with SIP compliant devices, so it is conceivable that it could call a Packet8 videophone. They have been focusing on adding features like video mail, an example of which is provided can be seen by clicking here. Another unique feature is there ability to hold a four stream, video conference call. Another differentiator is that they have a client that works on Apple’s computers. This provides Apple users with a way to bridge between their world and the PC world, something that Apple’s iChat apparently does not allow.
There are other features they have not enabled yet. One such feature is the recording of live video calls [he pointed out privacy issues as a concern with this feature]. Four streams. They can also put up floating logos, which opens up the world of advertising. In fact, they have an ad-rotator built into their product, so they can maximize their advertising real estate.
Lomand said that, “Partnering is their bread and butter.” As such, they are open to working with independent telcos to offer co-branded clients that can plug into telcos’ web sites, create revenue sharing opportunities. Lomand suggested SightSpeed is in the business for the long-haul and intends to be a stand-alone company. The overarching goal, as Lomand put it, is to, “Be the McDonalds of Video,” by making a high quality product that is easy to use.
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