We have been toying with a new video calling service from SightSpeed. We are using it in two different ways, first we are using it to allow Father Anthony to host meetings on college campuses from his home. Second, I have started an online small group with a few guys who are spread out around the country but still want to involved in a small group.

In the first setup, Father Anthony was using a video camera connected to his computer via firewire and a headset. At the University of Maryland - College Park, I setup a computer with a webcam, projector and conferencing microphone. Father Anthony gave a word and answered questions from a group of about 15 students.

I had a hard time getting a good shot with the webcam and the only Internet connection available was wireless (and it wasn’t reliable). Otherwise, once we got going it went pretty well (except for a few seconds of lost communication thanks to the spotty wireless). The video and audio was clear on both sides and the interaction was almost as good as if Father Anthony was there himself.

We are working on putting together a case that would have a video camera, computer, mic, speakers, and a projector all in one that we could send out to universities for video meetings. That would allow us to avoid all the setup issues and an assure good quality audio and video. We also are asking the students to work on reserving rooms with wired ethernet connections.

For my online small group, I asked all the members to go out and get a webcam and headset if they did not already have one. I had them install SightSpeed and test it with me before our meeting. I upgraded my SightSpeed Free plan to the Pro plan for $50 year (include free webcam and headset) so that I can host multi-party conferences (up to 4 people). Group members can use the free SightSpeed plan to connect to the conference.

One of the group members couldn’t get SightSpeed to connect, turned out it was because he had a bad proxy set in Internet Explorer (he used Firefox) and SightSpeed was using those settings.

The conference worked pretty well, video was great, but audio wasn’t perfect (I think it may have been due to one of the members poor quality headset or bad internet connections). To get past the bad audio, I had them all call into our conference bridge and we had a great first meeting.