I didn't get the SightSpeed upgrade installed and tested last night. Their servers were pretty busy and it got late, so I put it off until today. I've since upgraded two machines and played a little bit with it. Let me share a couple of impressions.

First and foremost, it just works. No mucking about with anything. Out of the box, it just works. Given the environments we all work in today, that's an important distinction. There are too many software solutions that require a ton of fiddling with. Not SightSpeed.

The changes in the software are nearly invisible. The codec revisions are built in, so the quality improvement really just happens quietly behind the scenes. Most of you have seen screen shots before, but here's the screen shot of a call to myself.



Its a simply and friendly inteface. Note that I have a small window showing me inthe lower right. The larger window is the person I'm talking to. The self-view can be easily toggled off and on, and the whole thing is easily blown to full screen. 30fps, great quality video on live calls. And great voice quality too.

The calling out feature to the the PSTN is easy to set up and use. Inbound calling looks just as easy, but since they don't yet support Washington numbers, I didn't set one up yet. That's all technology I'm sure the SightSpeed folks have mastered. I'll be setting that all up as soon as WA shows up on the list of available states and area codes.

For many people, the hot new feature is placeshifting TV. While that doesn't particulary excite me, here's a screen shot of that.



Note the video quality. Channel hopping is easy and fast. If you're looking to placeshift your TV stream, this could be a great tool. From a business perspective, I bet you could placeshift video surveillance cameras easily and set them up so they could be pulled up on demand for centralized monitoring. I was really impressed with this feature's quality and ease of use. It's just probably not something I'd use personally for my home TV viewing. I don't watch enough to find the value. Then again, I don't do Tivo or Slingbox or any other extras either.

You can record your own videos and post them on your blog. That's right, you can be the next cross between YouTube and Rocketboom right there at your computer. Easily and quickly. I'm not at a point in the day I can kick out a video blog post, but I'd suggest you check out the SightSpeed Guy. He's the master at these.

Feel free to check it out. Note that you have to be running IE. It doesn't work under Firefox. Still a neat little addition to the mix.

I like SightSpeed because the video quality is awesome. I do Skype video some, but it doesnt' hold a candle to this. The vioce quality is superb. The developers are focused on integration, interoperabilty and new things. I can tell you that this version went online last night and they're already hard at work on the next version. The SightSpeed team doesn't let grass grow under their feet at all.

There are things I hope to see in future releases. For me the big missing piece is recording the audio and peeling it off to something for podcasting. I'd like to be able to record longer sessions. Much longer. I'd like to be able to sign up for a premium business service that lets me record 30 minute webcasts. I'd like to record calls in both video and audio. I'd like SIP URL calling both inbound and outbound. I think those things will come. They're an industrious team of folks

In a couple of weeks, I'll be in Santa Clara for the VoIP Developer conference. I'm hoping to make a run to Berkeley and tour their offices and maybe even do a video with the SightSpeed Guy himself. in the meantime, I encourage you to check it out.


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