Resource types

I have been researching live multi point video conferencing/web conferencing software for several weeks.  It's a very fast-changing market out there with many new competitors and software every week.

WebEx  and Elluminate are big players in this market.  ePop and MS LiveMeeting are also prominent.  InstantPresenter is a very attractive new product.  A bit less expensive than the others.

They are ALL very expensive--$2,000 a year and up.

Recently I have discovered a very fine application that offers FREE service to anyone who has three or fewer users at a time (<90 minutes/session):  Spreed.com

It has application sharing, chat, polls/mood measures, multi point video, VOIP, whiteboard, annotation tools, file transfers and downloads, automatic email invitations, etc.

It's a Flash-based system.  You can host and attend meetings using any sort of platform (Windows/Mac/Linnux).

If you want more users at a time, pretty inexpensive "channels" are available ($600-->5/$1200-->10-->per year).  You can use it for unlimited amounts of meeting and times.

I have seen a specialized server for their software advertised, but I don't know the details.  I think it would be for large universities and corporations that want to handle lots of streaming video.

The application is written in Python and uses quite a bit of Open Source software for the infrastructure.  I don't think there is any recording of sessions.

It's worth checking out.  This is a German firm, so unfortunately the documentation is all in German, but the web site is in both languages.

Hey, Art--maybe you could translate for us?