Holiday Video Greetings - Does 2 Make for a Trend?

Earlier this week, I posted a short, video Season's Greetings message on my blog. I gave up on sending out cards years ago, which I miss doing, actually. I'm old fashioned that way, but have reverted to the path of least resistance - email greetings. Very efficient, esp for last minute sending, but not very personal.

Well, I think a video greeting is the next best thing, and I don't know how I could have done it without SightSpeed. It's a great application, and you don't have to look far to find my posting about it. They're poised for bigger and better things in 2007, and I'm just glad to be a user in the early going.

I don't follow a ton of blogs, but it was nice to see colleague Ken Camp picking up this vibe. He posted his video greeting earlier today, also using SightSpeed. Nicely done, Ken! We think alike, and try to use all the media tools at our disposal.

So, that makes two of us doing this. Does 2 make for a trend? In this case, I hope so. It's so easy to do, and adds a personal touch that email cards can't really match. Some smart person out there will see a business opportunity in this - Ken - maybe we should put our heads together on this one. We could develop some simple plug-ins to customize the look, maybe some special effects, and touch-ups to overcome bad lighting and glare. And then we can add music in the background to set the mood. I tried doing this on mine, actually, with a CD playing in the background, but it didn't work out. Lots of room to experiment here.

And finally - there's the end user experience. I realize it takes a long time for the video clip to load, which isn't great. My first take ran longer, and took way too long to load, so I shortened mine to around 30 seconds. Ken's runs over a minute, and I experienced some buffering problems in a few spots, so the longer clips can be a bit tougher to watch. On that note, I spoke to SightSpeed's CEO, Peter Csathy about this yesterday, and he's aware of the problem. So, hopefully the fix will be in soon.

On that note, I'll pass on Season's Greetings again. Signing off for now - not sure when I'll be back, but I won't be doing much blogging until Jan. 8. Gotta recharge...


Technorati tags: SightSpeed, Jon Arnold, Ken Camp