SharkJumping

Because my family is away for most of the Summer, I've been looking for ways to stay in touch, especially with my young children, for whom using a phone is a little difficult and too hard to visualize who is on the other end.  I had used about 9 months ago, but found that it was not ready for prime time, especially from an interface and set-up perspective.  Since Skype video is not available yet and the other dedicated video packages all seem too expensive, I tried Sightspeed again, and I have to say that it's been worth the effort. 

Sightspeed is a Peer to Peer Video over IP service, meaning the costs to provide it are quite low, allowing it to offer very reasonable pricing.  For the free package, you get 15 minutes of video calling per day, and 10 video mails per month, with the subscription packages giving you a greater feature set - you, of course, need video cameras on both ends - we use two Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro, and they seem to work well, including decent microphones.   The video mails are good if you want to leave a message if no one is home, and 15 mins per day is a perfect amount to allow you to say hi.   The quality varies, especially if you have Wi-Fi on both ends, and it took a little bit of tweaking to figure out which settings to use, but the functionality is more than adequate for a casual system.  The children love the concept and although the quality is not nearly high enough for a business situation, it's been a big win from a family perspective.  You can just imagine what it will be like in a few years as all of the underlying technology improves.  Has anyone else used other video systems?