The New York Times had a Tech article on 14th October entitled “Video Chat Service Aims to Follow YouTube’s Path” in which they wrote
A Web start-up company with some of the same backers who helped catapult YouTube to glory wants to do for live video chats what YouTube did for video watching. The company, TokBox, allows people with Webcams and broadband Internet connections to conduct face-to-face chats inside a Web browser. Users can visit its site, www.tokbox.com, or add a TokBox module to their pages on social Web sites like MySpace.
Sure enough, TokBox’s 1-to-1 Flash video chat is easily embeddable anywhere… here’s mine below (if I’m there, you can click to chat to me). I had it in my sidebar originally, but moved it to just this posting so it’ll disappear with time):
It’s great that they’re getting all this publicity, and that they’ve raised $4 Million from Sequoia Capital, even though, as it says in the article (“…then it will be up to the company to figure out a way to make money”)
I have mixed feelings about this (or maybe it’s just envy?). Ease of use and embeddability are crucial, so they’re doing the right thing. But $4M while figuring out how to make money: wow, I’d better go meet some of these guys, then. KMi’s FlashVlog is embeddable in the same way… my little ‘greeting’ in the upper right is exactly this, and our FlashMeeting does multiparty video chat much better. But quick 1-to-1, easily embedded anywhere, is a strong idea, and undoubtedly this is what Sequoia and others are banking on: they have a great window of opportunity for viral growth that other players in this space may have missed. They use Gigya to simplify embedding anywhere, and I would assume that the lion’s share of that investment capital must be going on scale, scale, scale, which is of vital importance. On the other hand, entry barriers are pretty low IMHO. If you can bankroll the scalability, then Flash already solves most of your problems for you. The Tokbox ‘user experience’ is pretty good, I must say. You need a headset to avoid audio feedback, but this is pretty normal these days– the alternative for a tool provider is to opt for push-to-talk audio like FlashMeeting has.
NOTE: if you run other tools that use Flash video, e.g. if you have a permanent presence is some other environment, like our own Hexagon, then you’re out of luck unless you spawn a fresh tabbed browser in advance: if you launch in a separate window, Flash does not like to handle two video environoments at once.
SUGGESTION FOR TOKBOX: The embeddable variant ought to be ‘less wide’, e.g. a single square that does ‘window-in-window’ video like Skype, or perhaps ‘expands or pops out when a call starts’: this will make it much more appealing for blog sidebar embedding and other similar locations where users are fussy about their screen real estate.
Technorati Tags: tokbox, flash, flashmeeting, flashvlog, video, chat
