Today is a big day for SureSpeak. Online registration is now live. After 8 years, SureSpeak’s time has finally come. People laughed at me in 2000 when I told them I wanted to provide a video platform that would allow people to practice their communication skills with a webcam and an internet connection. I was told upload and download speeds were too slow and that people wouldn’t use webcams to record themselves. We kept focused, landed a few good clients and ultimately trained over 5,000 corporate users between 2001-2006. Even though we got demonstrable results, and people enjoyed seeing themselves on video, web-based video as a training and practice tool had not been accepted. Then YouTube came along and changed everything. Since that time the world has rapidly accepted online video and the conversation about web-based training with webcams has become much easier.
From 2001 until mid 2007, video recording was done in Windows .wmv format. The file was recorded locally and stored in a temp file, and then a service ran that compressed and uploaded the video to our server. It worked very well, but was a HUGE pain in the neck to initially load each new user. There were 4-5 downloads a new user had to go through in order to begin using SureSpeak; .net, a transfer service, some Logitech code we tweaked using their SDK, etc. Since we were primarily still working with business users, that meant I had to sit with each machine and enable the downloads. We knew Flash was a better option, because we did not need downloads and would not have to fiddle with Active X settings in Internet Explorer. The problem was that I was caught up in the belief that we would lose significant quality if we went to Flash, as we would be streaming direct to the server. The quality of our .wmv videos seemed much clearer. For about 2 months in early 2007 I was obsessed with finding a way to record locally in Flash then upload, essentially replicating what we were doing with .wmv without the need for a lengthy set-up process. Flash allows you to either save to your local machine or direct to a server, not both. However, I was sure we could figure it out. I posted on guru.com looking for a solution. I got a lot of responses, and spoke to people in China, Romania, Poland, India and some weirdo in Florida. In the end I realized I was making things much more complicated than I needed to. We decided to go with Flash. The quality was good enough, and has gotten much better since. The decision to record in Flash ensured that all you needed was a webcam and you were plug-and-play. No downloads and no firewall issues. Now that online registration is complete, we are ready to invite the world into the SureSpeak community. That’s where we stand today, which is a big day for SureSpeak.
Thanks for reading and speak surely today!
