Great Solution That’s Mostly Invisible

Know what disturbs me? There are a wealth of great solutions out there that I’ll bet most of you have never heard of and never used.

Next week I’ll be doing a webcam interview for PCWorld and the guy driving it asked me to download and use the free version of SightSpeed, the “World’s Best Video and Voice Calling…FREE”.

I downloaded the Mac client, recorded some video, emailed myself, engaged someone else to test it with me, and I came away very, very impressed. Looking over the plan comparison list for the inexpensive pay version ($4.95 per month) I was stunned with how much is in there and how — even though I’ve stopped by their site before but never tried them out — they’re mostly invisible to the Web 2.0 community.

My favorite feature (and a real competitive differentiator for SightSpeed) is Multi-Party conferencing where up to four people (including you) can see one another and the conference can also be recorded and the video posted elsewhere or on a SightSpeed location. I haven’t tested this feature yet, but it appears promising. I also can’t find any multiparty conferences other than this one by the CTO of SightSpeed, Aron Rosenberg, who is talking with some guy about this feature (though admittedly I didn’t have time to search very hard). Notice how the lips get out of synch about 60% of the way through the video, however…this was my experience too.  UPDATE 10/26: For some reason (maybe the poor representative quality of the previous video) it was taken offline so here is another example delivered via Vimeo:

As a counterpoint to my glowing post and the SightSpeed site itself, here is a user who tells you why he likes but doesn’t always use Sightspeed.

There are other “video show” solutions out there like Mogulus (which lets you queue up and insert different webcams and videos in a true TV show-like format) as well as others like (the also pretty invisible) Hipcast, and higher visibility offerings like BlogTV and Stickam. But for ease of use, cheap monthly fees, highly competitive features, super-simple and Flash-based transport of your video inside a player, you owe it to yourself to check it out.