SightSpeed figures that as long as it can get people to try out its free product, they’ll become hooked on its superior technology and eventually trade up to a paid premium service. That premium service costs $4.94 a month or $49.50 a year with a free WebCam camera.
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 Maybe it’s time. After false starts ever since its 1964 introduction to the public at the New York World’s Fair, maybe video telephone service is finally poised to take off.A third of U.S. homes today have broadband connections, which allow fast transmission of video. That eliminates the delays and jerky motions that turned off users of video telephony in the past.Cameras are better. And personal computers, the device most video telephony services are hooked to these days, are arguably more powerful than telephones.Most importantly, with the Internet now a vehicle for making telephone calls for free or low cost through VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connections, maybe it’s only a matter of pushing the envelope to get people to make video calls over the Internet. That is the bet of SightSpeed Inc. of Berkeley, which has been developing its technology for five years while slowly signing up customers. SightSpeed offers software that lets users make video calls or send video e-mail over the Internet from their PC or Mac.Its software is available as a free download from the Web, or packaged with WebCam video cameras made by Creative Labs Inc. and packaged with PCs powered by Intel Corp.’s Centrino chipset for and Pentium 4 in desktops.Last week — to in fact push the envelope — SightSpeed announced it is offering its basic video telephone service for free.”A lot of people are interested in this stuff now,” said SightSpeed co-founder Brad Treat. “The market is turned on.”After all, there’s the hype over Skype, the tiny company offering free VoIP calling that eBay recently paid $2.6 billion to acquire, and the snapple over Apple and its new iMac with a built-in video conference camera. The moment is ripe.”There’s a threshold of quality you have to match to get consumers to use this,” Treat said. “Many of our predecessors were plagued by technological problems: small fuzzy pictures, delays — you can’t have a natural conversation with delays.”He said SightSpeed is the only service to offer voice and video at 30 frames a second. That makes it real-time, full-motion video.But why a free service?”As a small company, we realize we have to offer better quality service at a better offer,” SightSpeed President Scott Lomond said.There are other free and low-cost offerings out there: Some Internet service providers are offering free video instant messaging , and VoIP providers Skype and Packet8 are starting to offer video calls along with their voice service.SightSpeed figures that as long as it can get people to try out its product, they’ll become hooked on its superior technology and eventually trade up to a paid premium service. That premium service costs $4.94 a month or $49.50 a year with a free WebCam camera.That is pretty cheap: about 15 cents a day. “There are some OK-but-not-great video chat services and free video solutions from cable providers out there,” Lomond said. “We think a lot of consumers are in the bait-and-switch mode,” so that if they try the service, they will like it and be willing to upgrade and pay $50 a year for it. SightSpeed also offers video e-mail and multiparty conferencing.How will it make money on this?Lomond said its distribution agreements with Creative Labs, whose U.S. headquarters are in Milpitas, and Santa Clara-based Intel and others are carrying it through as it continues to add subscribers.Most of SightSpeed’s subscribers, who number slightly over 100,000, are consumers wanting it for “personal communications,” Treat said. The most common use is to see family members living across the country or in other countries.About 25 percent of its users are small businesses, which use it as an inexpensive-yet-good-quality video conferencing service. Treat sees a new use in blogging — video blogging — since this form of Internet broadcasting of personal views is taking off. |
