The one thing i have always liked about tokbox is the one click and your chatting approach to realtime video communications. Where as seesmic is the king of twitter style "leave a message" and get a reply, talking live has a really different vibe about it. I like the fact on tokbox i can fire up a chat, tweet it and have people join it without having an account on the tokbox service. Right now i think that tokbox has the upper hand with the ability to playback youtube videos and the sexy uber lite ui but could the new kid on the block, tinychat step in with their offering including a hd mode for $14.95 a month steal the show?
For a start you have to look at this from a number of angles, as i like to do i have broken them into areas that i find the most important for me as a streaming user and editor and have made a few suggestions of what each company should do to satisfy the user.
ease of use
the one thing about video chat online is the ability for anyone to actually start chatting - the problem with some systems like oovoo, skype is that you need their application to actually start chatting. The "1 click nature" of being able to join the chat is the key that both of these chatting engines have - even without an account you can get in and chat straight away with minimal fuss. other video conferencing applications should take notice, allow your community to build your brand by talking about you via twitter and facebook rather than force an application down our necks with your branding on it. if your codebase is good, you release regular updates and you listen to your community - they will do the advertising of your brand for you. keep it nimble.
notification intergration
both sites do very well of supporting social networks including the bigboys of twitter and facebook. one thing they both do not currently do is have an ability to retweet when the conversation is still on. with many people living between countries and different timezones it can be almost impossible to know if a video chat is active on any of the services - it would be great to have a directory or a visual clue on the frontend that video conversations and chats are happening. trying to join would ask the editor if they are allowed in or not or you could set a channel key. a twitter notification at the start of a chat is ok if all people see it. I suggest having multiple timings to "retweet" that the conversation is still on and have a topic field an editor can fill out so people know what the topic is about being discussed. I would have a tweet setting of 15 minutes, 30 and hourly. that should cover all bases.
video assets library
both sites do not offer something that would be very valuable for a video chat, conference tool - an asset library. I do agree that this might move away from the business model for both of these two clients but i think for retention of users and for editors/content creators to use the sites for live video conferencing you might as well make the extra effort for a user to have an asset library. This could be video clips you want to play in your stream, add intros or outros and make a more polished live production. Doing this would also enable the ability to make realtime shows that could be saved for distribution later - removing the editing constraints normally required by doing a show and allow more mobility for small content producers. ie. not chained to the desk! :)
editor controls
most of the time if you have too many people in a chat you have a number of things happen - everyone either tries to talk over someone, then lag is applied and all of a sudden you have people waiting to talk and then everyone is quiet. just recently i have seen that @cameronreilly approach is for everyone to mute until someone wants to reply. This works quite well but i would like to see more controls for the editor - maybe with the editor having a main window with the other people at the side and people press a button to either request the camera or have picture-in-picture with that user. I also have a bunch of ideas how you can make user retention last longer, but you'll have to put me on a retainer for that information! :)
making money
whenever i see a new web services appear that fulfills a need - i often wonder how long "will this company be around" - I know that sounds morbid but in this digital age, money is spent developing these services up and they never quite deliver. maybe it is the distortion from the echo chamber, the wanting to one up another service - or even just so determined to succeed you can miss the point of converting the passion of success into a product that people can stick a line under and say - yep, worked great (ie. evernote as an example)
I do like that from the get-go on v2 tinychat has put in the ability for a user to have a pro chat room for $14.95 - i dislike the price however but i guess they have costs and bandwidth to cover - if they changed $9.99 i think they would do much better. In fact $9 - i like numbers like that, let us remove these .99 from the world they are just a fake way of looking like you are getting value - it is an out of date model of selling via visual trickery. I do hope that the HD mode they suggest is the ability to have HD quality (720p at least) if not they need to rename it as HQ (high quality) else it is misleading to the public.
update - i'm told that the HD should be the raw feed from your camera so if you have a HD camera then you should be able to get HD from it. I have my canon hv20 connected via the hdmi cable to an intensity blackmagic with it receiving 1080i and i can tell you, what i see in the demohd room on tinychat is not hd. i have suggested they rename to HQ for high quality (i think you get better quality image) - i'm just not certain i want to pay $14.95 to get that slight quality bump. If it was 720p HD then maybe. ;)
A few additional notes floating around my mind for each company...
tokbox
- employ a community manager, be nimble - regular releases.
- the getting out of sync audio weirdness are really annoying (first priority)
- not sure reason for the drag and drop (remove, pointless control)
- editor controls to be able to mute everyone
- main feed with cueing controls
- ability to see a list of ongoing video chats so you can click and ask to join
- have the ability also to start private chat rooms that cannot be seen in a list
- twitter notifications timer - ability to set messages at intervals that the video chat is still on, one tweet at the start of someones day might be missed by someone else in another - have ability retweet that the video chat is still on in intervals
- toxbox public timeline needs ability to set age range of peoples posts you want to see
tinychat
- would like to see pricing come down (will probably go free)
- says hd (is not hd) but they are changing to hq
- have a more agile team than tokbox to make new things happen quickly.
- self-funded, bootstrapped companies are the future of web development. i like.
- you confused me with your facebook app called coolcam, not tinychat.
- with the embed would like it to drop straight into the chat - no clicking on icon thing.
