Video chat expands

Zia Daniell Wigder | June 01, 2007, 09:59 AM

Now that our initial series of videoconferences has finished, I’m starting to assess future locations for the program. Some of the groups I'm talking to, such as one in an area of Jordan near the Iraqi border, don’t have videoconferencing equipment, but do have a broadband connection at a local IT center. As a result, I’m looking at low-cost options for videoconferencing that would enable them to join the program.

The easiest way to videoconference cheaply is to use one of the existing video chat applications. There’s been a lot going on in this space: Skype, iChat, AIM, MSN and Yahoo! - and likely soon gTalk - all have video capabilities built into their messengers. Most of these applications focus on one-to-one video chat; a third party software add-on such as Festoon is required for multi-person conferencing.

ooVoo, a new player, will be officially entering the video chat market on June 11th. ooVoo’s focus is on the multi-user experience: up to six people can enter the dialogue simultaneously. A demo at the Video 2.0 Meetup on Wednesday night included six people in various US locations; we tested it ourselves yesterday morning with participants in London and two different New York locations.

The interface is sleek and easy to use; the quality of the video is generally very good. As with most video chat, there's some latency, although it didn't seem any worse in the connection with London than between the two locations in New York. At times, the slight latency did impact the conversation: unlike group videoconferencing, where some in-person dialogue generally takes place within the different participant groups, multi-person video chat tends to involve a series of individual participants. The split-second delay between all participants can be enough to disrupt the natural conversation flow and make interactions a bit more difficult than they might be on a voice conference call. Being a strong proponent of interactive video, however, I found the visual cues we gained through the conversation outweighed these downsides, especially once we adjusted to the speed of the conversation.

More on these guys post-launch, but they’re off to a good start: 100,000 installed users after the first month of just word of mouth marketing. Not bad when you consider that most people using the application probably had an IM client with video capabilities already downloaded.