Low cost Video Conferencing in the News

Last week I explained how video conferencing being sold by HP, Cisco, Polycom and Tandberg is overpriced so it seems that I'm not the only one thinking along those lines.

Former PC Magazine product reviews editor Davis Janowski, who made a move to Crain's Publications has written a parallel piece in Investment News highlighting SightSpeed that applauds their efforts based on his personal, first hand experience.

Over at ZD Net, George Ou highlights the new "lower priced" solution from LifeSize, which priced between 6k and 60K seems like a bargain compared to Cisco and HP's prices. Then you look at the needed bandwidth and see that you need dedicated pipe that will run $300 a month or more, versus using anything from 256K on up and having SightSpeed work perfectly as tested by many others in the blogosphere. Same with Skype (but without the depth of field and real life feel)...

With low cost solutions that perform better, and help validate the need for video conferencing as Janowski has pointed out, one has to wonder why there is a market for the high priced systems?

I guess purchasing agents are happier writing big checks than preserving the bottom line.