Arthur -
I got around to downloading your demo of Cinemail last week, and I have a few comments. I don't think the program as it stands will be a great success. I didn't even bother to download the demo of the competition's product, I'll take your word for it that Cinemail blows it away. Nevertheless, I don't think your product is ready for prime time. First of all, the lip movements of the speaker are not at all in sync with the sound. In fact, his lips seem to move only once every few frames, the body movements are jerky, and all the movements seem almost to be at random. And this is a relatively static image where the person speaking hardly moves at all. It makes me wonder how well Cinemail handles clips with a lot of movement, and how much larger the file sizes would be if it wasn't a fairly static image. As I'm sure you know, the less movement there is in an image, the easier it is to compress. The quality of the picture itself is decent, but still not nearly as good as, say, a quicktime video.
The bottom line is that this product will need tremendous improvement to become a viable money maker, and to receive widespread acceptance. In attempting to accomplish this task your programmers, are up against the likes of Real Networks, Apple, and several other players with years of experience in this area, and tons of resources (both monetary and human) to enable them to develop a superior product. Based on what I've seen so far, I don't rate your chances as being very good.
FWIW,
Mark |
