Webcams Get Community on Vlip
Videoconferencing service SightSpeed Friday launched a personal webcam community called Vlip. All you need is a webcam of your own to post to the site, either starting a conversation or participating in an existing one. However, the site isn’t standing up well to launch-day traffic, so you may want to bookmark it for later.
The idea, said SightSpeed CEO Peter D. Csathy in a phone call this morning, is to create an active message board community where the mode of communication of video. He contrasts this with video-sharing sites, where a small portion of the viewership typically contributes the vast majority of the content.
Companies like WengoVisio, VideoEgg, and YouTube offer webcam uploads, but not at the center of a destination site, with webcam specific features like embeddable conversation threads and click-to-call responses. That’s where Vlip is hoping to be different.
While pushing these tools forwards is useful, I can’t say it makes sense to me to have a free-form, blank-slate message board — text, audio, video, whatever. Seems like adding such tools as a white-label service to communities that already have something to talk about would be more useful — and perhaps more viable as a business model than straight-out advertising.
First things first though, the Vlip site could use a design, functionality– the embed code is so ugly I’m having trouble using it — and uptime overhaul.
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Liz, thanks for your comments. Quite frankly, we were inundated yesterday with unexpectedly high volumes — but, we have since addressed this capacity issue and things should be humming along nicely. Appreciate your comments on our early beta UI — and, regarding the code, there is much complexity to our embeddable player (as the full vlip experience of can live in any other web environment, including your own social network profile or blog). Given its complexity — there is nothing else like it — there is more to it of course.
Peter Csathy (CEO of SightSpeed/Vlip) on March 17th, 2007 at 6:01 am - Permalink
Peter, just like Liz has mentioned - first things first, completely change the UI of that site. It is a bit scary! That colour will not do it for you. It, as well as the layout didn’t give me a chance to even try its functionality.
Vic Okezie on March 19th, 2007 at 12:18 pm - Permalink
I found it much easier to record a quick clip than youtube.com’s vlog - about the same ease as dailymotion.
Please add text links to sections of the site. An all Flash app front page is sorta lame.
Robert on March 19th, 2007 at 2:57 pm - Permalink
[...] by the latest call for entries over at Vlip, the video clip destination site from SightSpeed (see previous coverage). They’re using Craigslist to troll for talent, whom they’re asking to post videos to [...]
NewTeeVee » NTV Moneymaker: Become a Stah, Baby on May 9th, 2007 at 4:36 pm - Permalink