VidChat: Talking Videocalls with Peter Csathy, CEO of SightSpeed

On Friday I sat down for a VidChat with Peter Csathy, CEO of SightSpeed.

SightSpeed is responsible for the videocalling application I use to create VidChats.

It’s a product I continue to be impressed with in terms of its ease of use and its ability to work well even in the absence of big bandwidth connectivity. In fact, during much of this call I was receiving less than 100Kbps from and sending less than 200Kbps to Peter. While these aren’t ideal conditions and the picture quality would be much improved with more bandwidth, I still found it impressive as despite the lack of bandwidth it didn’t impact the quality of the conversation we were able to have.

So sit back and enjoy learning a bit more about SightSpeed and what it’s going to take to encourage the rest of the world to start adopting videocalling.

(Be forewarned, I'm trying out different video hosting sites, and this one introduced a second of feedback right at the beginning.)

As happened last time and with every VidChat, here are followup notes and links to the topics discussed herein:

- To learn more about SightSpeed's MySpace widget, click here. If you want to actually use it you'll need to sign up for an account at MySpace.com.

- Peter mentioned SIP on a couple of occasions. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and it enables SIP-equipped devices to talk to each other. To date those primarily consist of VoIP phones, though it portends a future where different SIP-enabled videocalling platforms may be able to talk to each other, which could be a boon to spurring the mainstream adoption of videocalling.

- He discusses how his company is using SightSpeed to enable his employees to only have to come into the office twice a week, working the rest of the time from home. He specifically cites this as a tremendous way to reduce our dependence on and demand for foreign oil. I wrote about the environmental benefits of greater use of broadband here.

- The CODIE award Peter mentions was given to SightSpeed as the Best Communication Solution of 2008. The CODIEs are given out by the Software & Information Industry Association, a trade organization for the software and digital content industry. The CODIEs claim the title of the only "peer-recognition awards program of its kind in the industry." You can see all the 2008 winners here.

- I did a little digging and found that to realize the 640x480 picture Peter mentioned is possible through SightSpeed you need 1.5Mbps on both ends, which is a bit more than most people have on the upload side, unless you live in a community with FTTH, of course!

- To learn more about SightSpeed's different pricing options, go check out their site here.