July 06, 2006
Sightspeed - Free Video VoIP Calling Is Here
Aside from The Jetsons cartoon TV show, does anyone remember how long it's been since the public was promised video phones? (1964 World's Fair) I know I've wished for a way to communicate live with my grandmother, thousands of miles away, for a very long time. Well hello grandma, Sightspeed VoIP video calling is here, and it's free.
Sightspeed is a competitor to Skype, who enabled video calling last year, in their 2.0 beta version. Like Skype, Sightspeed has free PC-to-PC calling for both audio and video, and low rates for PC-to-phone calls. Now this is different than Vodafone's video calling, which is done on cell phones over their 3G network.
Sightspeed also lets you create free video mail, publish to a video blog, and have video conference calls with up to three other people. What a fantastic idea. I can't wait to try this out.
To be fair, Skype might also have this feature, but they haven't made any effort to make this obvious on their home page. Am I going to dig through the website looking for these features? Well, I used their search and still didn't see a "summary" page touting similar features.
I already have Skype, and it requires Skype-certified webcams. While my Palm Treo 650 camera shows up in my Skype list, it doesn't appear to work. My dedicated webcam just requires too much RAM for me to bother using it on my laptop. (Actually, I just tested it, and Skype doesn't seem to pick it up either.)
Anyway, Sightspeed's plans look enticing. Their "free" plan includes an unlimited number of voicemails of 30 seconds in length, and stores each for 30 days. The paid plan (US$4.95/m, 49.95/yr) allows unlimited 60 sec videomail for unlimited durations. Not bad, certainly affordable. The free plan does not allow unlimited multi-party video conferencing. Other than that and the support, there isn't a lot of difference between the free and paid plans. But if I can convince any of my friends or family to get something like Skype or Sightspeed, let alone a videocam or a microphone, it might be worthwhile paying for the service.
The only annoying thing about trying to download Sightspeed is that, besides requiring to you register (which is fair enough), they try to sell you a camera along the way. I just want to try the damn software already. One interesting sentence in their terms states that minors must get permission from parents to use video conferencing. Bravo for that. (Maybe Skype has that too; I may have missed it.)
After downloading and installing a copy of Sightpeed, and running through the fairly easy configuration, I find that my webcam works fine, even with my laptop's RAM usage maxed out. Cool. However, my Palm Treo 650 camera did not work, so either it's not support, or I don't have it configured right.
Now if could only get my friends and family to realize the value of VoIP, I'm all set to gab online. But if Video VoIP will be as popular as text messaging, I guess it means I'm going to have start shaving everyday again :)
Sightspeed runs on Win 2000, Win XP, and Mac OSX 10.3.9 or higher.
Sources: 21Talks [via Andy Abramson]
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