Alec Saunders SquawkBox

SightSpeed Marketing VP Eric Quanstrom joined us on this morning’s SquawkBox conference call.  This call was inspired by the fact that SightSpeed seems to be multiplying the number of ways that you can use their technology pretty dramatically. They’re touching everything from MySpace to corporate video conferencing.   It seemed a good opportunity to hear from one of the market leaders in desktop video how the market is evolving.

We covered SightSpeed’s product offerings, corporate video versus personal desktop video, and how the new SightSpeed Lite widgets embedded in MySpace and Hi5 have different usage models from traditional video calling.  Along the way we also talked about the background trends in the industry that are driving the adoption of video, such as the inclusion of video on almost all new consumer laptops.

On the conference call: Eric Quanstrom, Mike Pruyn, James Body, Jeb Brilliant, Cheryl Cink, Sheryl Breuker, Jim Courtney, Bill Volk and Andy Abramson

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 Squawk Box August 19 [38:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

SightSpeed’s Eric Quanstrom gave us the low-down on SightSpeed Light for MySpace this morning — what it does, how it works, why MySpace, what the experience of developing for MySpace was like, and a whole bunch more.

Embedded in user’s profiles, Sightspeed Light lets users talk in real time, or with threaded video conversations. Although it’s separate from SightSpeed currently, Eric told us that an upcoming release would allow SightSpeed Light users to connect with SightSpeed users who aren’t on MySpace. Eric also revealed that SightSpeed is likely to take SightSpeed Light to another OpenSocial platform in the near future, and that the company may also release plug-in’s for popular blogging platforms.

With us on the call: Alec Saunders, Neal Saferstein, Randall howard, Dan York, Jeanette Fisher, Aaron Huslage, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Jim Byrnes, Mike Pruyn, and of course, Eric Quanstrom.

 

 Squawk Box April 24 [30:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The team at Sightspeed upped the ante on video chat yesterday, announcing Sightspeed Light, for MySpace. They’re offering video mail, public video posting, and video chat to MySpace users.  And in a move reminiscent of some other startups, like Seesmic and Hictu, they’re offering threaded video conversations as well.  Record a short video, post it to your page, and wait for a reply.

Sightspeed’s move is smart for two reasons:

1. It takes video directly to a youth audience in the environment that they’re comfortable with. Expect to see lots of creative uses for video coming from the MySpace audience.
2. It backfill’s the MySpace feature set, making the service more competitive against Facebook, which already has the video messaging feature being supplied by SightSpeed.

When I had Peter Csathy from Sightspeed on Squawkbox last week I asked him about small business uses for his services.  Sly fellow that he is, he essentially said "Stay tuned".  Yesterday Sightspeed and VTel announced a partnership targeted at small and medium business.  Under the terms of their deal:

1. “SightSpeed Business”, their SMB focused offering, will be installed on the VTEL conference room systems. What that means is that VTEL systems will be able to interoperate with all SightSpeed client endpoints (including all consumer endpoints).  Now small businesses can have the benefits of video conferencing with remote workers, without having to install a conferencing system in every site.
2. In addition, VTEL will introduce and market SightSpeed Business into its reseller channel — a significant broadening of the Sightspeed distribution channel.

This is an interesting and logical counterpoint to a lot of the video activity we've seen coming from Sightspeed's chief competition in the desktop video space — Skype.  By partnering with an established standards based player in this way, Sightspeed is creating new value and a new price point for professional multi-point video conferencing, and they're taking advantage of established standards in a way that Skype may find more difficult to emulate.

Andy is feeling his oats this morning in Madrid.  He cites Steve Adubato’s piece in the Newark Star-Ledger on how to make video conferences more productive, and then takes the entire video conferencing industry to task for not understanding their customers’ needs.  Andy sees web cam based solutions, like the excellent system from SightSpeed, as the key to successful conferencing.  Forget about the complication and expense of the Cisco Telepresence platform, HP’s Halo, or older systems from Polycom, Tandberg and others!

He’s right.

When Cisco announced the Telepresence platform, the biggest mystery was why they chose to dive into a dying industry.  Yes, dying.  The graph below was reproduced from Wainhouse founder Marc Beattie’s slides from the Wainhouse CSP event last year at this time.  It shows video conferencing service provider revenues since 2001.  The decline probably has a lot to do with the fact that the novelty of video conferencing installations which drove the market in 2001 in no way justifies the expense in 2006.  Note that Marc doesn’t comment on the market for video conferencing equipment in this slide.

Andy’s also right about the utility of personal video calls, such as those enabled by Sightspeed.  With virtually every laptop sold today incorporating a web cam, and the quality of those cameras steadily increasing, it’s only a matter of time before the natural way to have a conversation will be by video.