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As an expatriated person, I find myself thinking of home sometimes. Video conferencing with people from the old country is fun, so I thought I'd have a look at the details on Cisco's new Umi video conferencing unit.
Let me say, I have no idea what they're thinking here. It's for home use. It costs $599. Then, you have to pay $24/month for a plan to use it. To call other people who have a Umi.
Because it doesn't work with Skype, or FaceTime. Or anything other than Google Video chat (which is itself free for non PSTN calls).
So basically, you're charging as much as a computer + webcam (which you could hook up to a TV), you can't connect to Skype, and you're charging a monthly fee for something everyone else is giving away for free.
Let me know how that works out for you...
Let me say, I have no idea what they're thinking here. It's for home use. It costs $599. Then, you have to pay $24/month for a plan to use it. To call other people who have a Umi.
Because it doesn't work with Skype, or FaceTime. Or anything other than Google Video chat (which is itself free for non PSTN calls).
So basically, you're charging as much as a computer + webcam (which you could hook up to a TV), you can't connect to Skype, and you're charging a monthly fee for something everyone else is giving away for free.
Let me know how that works out for you...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-08 08:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-09 12:10 am (UTC)I noticed the other day that one of my clients seems to have a permanent warm body just to keep a videoconferencing room functioning (or that's that staff member's main duty). Seems to be regarded as an acceptable cost.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-09 02:19 am (UTC)There's actually a lot of scope for this to be a good value proposition. It has a PTZ camera which is actually quite hard to get in a webcam form factor. It has optical zoom, which sounds important to me if you're shoving it on top of a tv. It quite possibly has a microphone array with decent noise cancellation, something sadly missing from most skype and facetime setups.
The per month cost is an interesting one - if they use it to enable multi-way conferencing, then I'm ok with it... if it's just for missed calls and shit then it's a bit of a waste of money. A 3rd party service is a requirement for multi-way conferencing to not suck though.
It also has the 'plug and play' aspect, which is valuable to a lot of people this is aimed at.. you know, grandparents.