SightSpeed

» see sightspeed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sightspeed started in 2001 in berkeley, california, built by brad treat and aron rosenberg and backed by the roda group. It did video and voice calls over the internet, computer to computer, with an option to ring real phones too, on both windows and mac. Its selling point was picture quality. When most webcam calls of the era stuttered and dropped frames, sightspeed's looked smooth, and reviewers noticed.

Good technology and a small user base is a familiar spot to be in, and it ended the usual way. In october 2008 logitech, the company that made the webcams people were plugging in to do this, bought sightspeed for thirty million dollars. The software became the engine under a new consumer product, logitech vid, meant to make video calling one click away from a logitech camera.

The video calls that reached me went through msn messenger, over a cheap webcam plugged into a tower in ankara. That was how everyone i knew put a face on a screen in the mid-2000s, and later it was skype. Sightspeed sat outside all of that. It was an american product that engineers praised for its picture, with a paid tier and a real company behind it. None of that mattered when the free thing everyone already had did the same job. I respected the engineering and never once opened it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

For a hardware company the logic was clean on paper. Logitech sold the cameras; owning the calling software meant owning the whole experience from lens to screen. Vid was pitched as the easy button, no accounts to wrangle, just point the webcam and call. The catch was that nobody chooses a video app because it came with their camera. They choose the one their friends are already on.

~ the next chapter ~

By the time logitech shipped vid, skype was already the default, the free thing installed on every machine, the name that had turned into a verb. There was no room for a webcam maker's side project next to it. Logitech shut vid down on 1 july 2013, stopped the downloads, closed new registrations, and the sightspeed name that had ridden inside it for five years ended there. The good video engine outlived its own brand and still lost.

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