GreenAppX

Website: video.greenappx.com

I had two really different opinions on this product, one after my personal demo and another after a demo with Mark who I know from LinkedIn. This will most likely lead me to changing my test protocol since the experience was so widely different.

Home demo: Desktop to iPad as usual. I put the Ipad in a spare bedroom pointing out the window. I live close to the road on a busy street so I could see and hear cars both in real life and through the iPad. Sync between audio and video was terrible, with an average around four seconds. I would see and hear the car in real life, hear it in my headphones…….then see it on video. Video was pixelated on the desktop, but very good on the iPad. Testing also had my usual hand waving in front of the camera trying to make it throw up. Latency and sync lag was affected during this.

Demo Two with Mark Pearlstein: Mark sent me an email invite and connection was obviously easy (just inputting his room number and my name). He was able to adjust performance based on bandwidth (which I was unable to figure out). Performance of the product was completely different from my home demo; of course, we had a video call and not a hand waving exercise. I used my desktop for this. I’ll discuss this demo more below.

Ease of Use

GreenAppx has a 1.7mb download that launches when you log into the browser. Once installed, you go to the website, log in and the software comes up to connect to meetings. Invitations are handled via email and as an invitee it is easy to join a meeting, only inputting your name and the session id (I call it a room number).

Quality of Product

Well, per demo two it’s good. It’s not the best video I’ve seen but it is far from the worst. Audio to video sync was excellent. My only real issue was that the audio would go “tinny” if there was cross talk between the participants and happened many times over the 30 minute call. This demo was point to point so I don’t know how it works in a real life multi-point meeting with everyone trying to talk at once. A few times I needed something repeated to me.

The product has a whiteboard, program sharing and file sharing (and some others that I saw on a PowerPoint slide show). Maybe there are a few too many bells here that I personally wouldn’t use.

GreenAppX is due for an upgrade by the end of the month with some new stuff and enhancements to the existing stuff. I won’t go into it because I didn’t ask for approval to discuss future releases, but they should greatly improve the product.

Pricing

Pricing is available on video.greenappx.com/subscribe. It is a month to month deal with no commitment. Your subscription can be changed if you need to have meetings with more than four people, and changed back again the next month. A four-seat “concurrent” license is $99.95 per month and scales up by four people from there. That means if I bought it, I could invite three people at a time. These need not be the same three people each time. The license is for the moderator (purchaser). That’s the pricing model I like.

Overall it’s a product I would recommend except for one thing, the price. The quality and ease of use are there, but at $100/mo it’s too much for someone in my situation. With the soon to happen enhancements and a price cut it would be a no-brainer.

Bryan
Hellard Design