Video Conferencing? Look to Apple's iChat and iSight

November 16, 2006 - 3 minute read -
Mac OS X

At SpiderLogic we have offices in Milwaukee, WI, Madison, WI and Pune, Maharshtra, India. While Milwaukee and Madison are right next door in the global sense, Pune is all the way around the world. Being so distant can make communication challenging of course. When you are in a one-on-one situation, you have quite a few options to use. Obviously we use email and instant messaging for many exchanges. We share information more widely using a Wiki. Often though you just can't beat the power of a good conversation. In a one-on-one situation we generally use Skype which offers a free voice service as long as you are calling another Skype user.

What We've Done In the Past

Where we've struggled in the past is when we want to do group discussions. Skype will support up to 5 users on a conference call which generally works fairly well. Beyond that you have to do something else. Any conference call can be difficult to manage with a lot of voices. Having visual feedback offers a natural way for people to signal their intent to talk. It's what we do everyday when we jump into conversations. Sometimes nothing beats the power of a face-to-face conversation as well. Being able to see people react to what you say is very powerful feedback. It's also a connection that you grow to miss sometimes when you work with people in very impersonal mediums like email.

We've tried a number of things for video solutions in the past including Skype video. None of them have lived up to our expectations. We've even looked into special video conferencing solutions, some of which had price tags into the $20,000 US range!

What about iChat AV?

We decided to give iChat AV a try. The Pune office already had a Mac Mini that they've used for some QA work in the past. They got an iSight for their end to complete the package. I brought in my MacBook Pro which has a built-in iSight camera for the Milwaukee office to use..

The end result is that we were absolutely thrilled by the experience. It generally met or exceeded all of our expectations. The only problem we had was that the sound was a little bit low. We need to figure out some way to boost the sound output, probably with some better external speakers or a USB speaker phone appliance of some sort. The experience of looking at a conference room full of people sitting all the way around the world and being able to have a meeting with almost the same level of interaction as if we were all sitting together is almost indescribable. In the past we've avoided more interactive discussions and stuck to presentations because of the difficulties in the remote communication. This time we were able to have very good exchanges with both sides contributing and jumping in when they saw fit.

Cost

The cost for us was $150 to get the iSight since we had all the other pieces in place. If you would do it from scratch:

  • Mac Mini - $600
  • iSight - $150
  • Keyboard and Mouse - $50
  • Monitor - $200

That means that even if you started from nothing, no monitors, no keyboards and mice, it would cost you $2,000 to set up both ends. That comes to about 10% of the cost of some of the video conference solutions. Chances are really good that you'll have some of that already which could bring the cost down a lot.

I think the experience of this could really sell a lot of people on the Apple solutions. We're really looking forward to the next version that promises to add desktop sharing to the mix as well. So then we can have great chats with great presentations (using Keynote of course). And people say that Macs don't belong in the workplace! I beg to differ.

Price References

Mac Mini iSight Apple USB Keyboard Apple Might Mouse 19 in Widescreen LCD Monitor