Fellow blogger Andy Abramson has been covering SightSpeed a lot lately. SightSpeed offers a software based approach to video conferencing, much like Skype does for voice calling. The big difference is, that Skype is active in a consumer market, while SightSpeed mainly serves the business market. Seeing that most companies still prefer fixed handsets on their desks, they apparently aren’t so picky when it comes to video.

So my question is, will video calling lead the revolution here and convert handset users to softphones for voice calling? Their have been plenty of good softphone solutions available for a long time, but they are mainly used complementary to a desk phone.

I see two issues playing here:

1. Video conferencing equipment is prohibitively expensive
2. Video conferencing uses a more presence based approach where you know the availability of your contacts beforehand.

While there are some good and relatively cheap video handsets available, such as the Grandstream GXV-3000, this only tackles the first issue as they do not provide a presence based approach. I have yet to see small business “boardrooms” being filled with these phones. Are SMB’s skipping a step and going all software directly. If this is true, good times are ahead for applications such as CounterPath’s Bria and companies who do not want to rely on 3rd party services for their conferencing needs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 10:52 CEST and is filed under Software, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.