I'm putting together a small office where one of the partners will be living outside the UK and another partner will frequently be on the road. We are using mostly SIP-based telephony and I'd like to introduce a videoconferencing solution that's suitable for everyone w/ standard or semi-standard hardware. Does anyone have any good experience for 3 way (or 3+ way) videoconferencing without shelling out tens of thousands of $ for a Tandberg unit?

Skype-to-skype would be sufficient for us partially, but I was hoping there's a better SIP based solution out there that could handle 3-way or n-way calls. Unfortunately, Google results are pretty poor for this space and it's hard to disambiguate! Anyone have suggestions?

Thanks!

Use the beta version of Skype v5, it support multi-party video calls. Search the skype site for beta and you'll find it.

What video standard does Counterpath use on it's clients over SIP. Apple's Facetime is an open standard and runs over SIP. I expect others will implement the same.

Ah, good point Dubai Stu, I forgot about Counterpath. Just looking on their site it seems Bria supports videoconferencing. I need to test it out to see how much bandwidth is sucks down... Thanks

Another potential option here is Adobe Connect that supports webcams and USB-based video sources. Version 8 is coming out in November and it will support video conferencing units. Also, you get the added collaboration/conferencing features of the platform. I really like the ability to be able to have a persistent room rather than creating new meeting invites each time.

PM me if you want more information.