After a long run, and a successful exit to Logitech, SightSpeed for consumers has been quietly retired by the folks at Logitech.
If you visit the web page, you’ll see that SightSpeed for Business, an app my agency helped launch, remains front and center, but Logitech has taken SightSpeed and turned it into Vid, a personal one on one video chat solution. Since my account is a business account I can’t determine with certainty, but reports are that the SightSpeed service is no longer active for consumers and Vid is what replaced it.
Last week at IT Expo, I moderated a panel on the future of video conferencing, and pretty much used an axis of differentiation, as well as category naming to really segment the marketplace.
Apps like Vid, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, all which offer one on one video calling are really Video Chat.
SightSpeed for Business, ooVoo, iChat, are multi-party video calling.
An app like EyeBeam or Bria, both of which are from Counterpath are SIP Video applications and likely have the most upside potential because they are h.264 and SIP based, thus technology ready for what everyone has agreed is the standard for video in the coming era.
Above all that are the various systems that are room based, ala BrightCom, Tandberg, PolyCom, HP, LifeSize and of course, the Mac Daddy of it all now, Cisco’s Telepresence.
The key here is that the Video Chat is really a consumer grade, free model of talking and seeing one another and closest to the model of the Jetsons video calling, something that Scott Wharton nailed with VidTel, his no brain, plug and play, dial and see solution that makes video calling as easy as dialing the phone, because it is using a phone.
To me, what Logitech has done, is very, well, in the words of Mr. Spock, “logical.” Since it’s launch rumors have it they have garnered some one million users, largely from promotion in the boxes of their video cameras and online communications to users of their products. This shows me that the vision and reality of SightSpeed’s past CEO Peter Csathy, founder Aaron Rosenberg, COO Scott Lomond and VP Marketing wiz Eric Quanstrom (aka as EQ), whom I had the pleasure of working with for almost four years was dead on the money. That being, make a simple, easy to use video calling solution, that’s portable, and people will use it.