[X4U] Video conferencing on a PC

[Scott McCulloch]

Does anyone here have any recent experience doing video conferencing on 
a PC?

Some colleagues and I have been using iChat for meetings and are very 
happy with it (though we'd love to have an integrated whiteboard -- 
having said that I just discovered that I can send drawings done in Ink 
through an iChat text message - not ideal for our needs, but it was a 
fun discovery!).

Anyway, we're now entering a situation where some of our clients want 
to do meetings "virtually" rather than traveling to meet in person. 
Typically each individual client will require 3-4 very long meetings 
(several hours) over the course of a couple of months. Unfortunately, 
most of them are on Windows. I've been looking into online meeting 
systems like WebEx and Elluminate, and while they do have some good 
features, nothing seems to hold a candle to the iChat experience in 
terms of the video portion (which we think might be important for what 
we're doing - body language and facial expression can be very valuable 
sources of information). So, one thought we had was that we could buy a 
couple of refurbished powerbooks and use them as "loaners" for our 
clients -- set them up with iChat and maybe iStorm for whiteboarding (I 
haven't tested it yet), send them the powerbook and then have them send 
it back after their program with us is done (building in a small 
"rental" fee, of course). Who knows, it might even produce a few 
"switchers" along the way. ;-)

Other than the problem of coming up with the money to finance the 
initial powerbook purchases, I think we might face a problem convincing 
some of these Windows-centric organizations that this is a good idea. 
So, what I'm wondering is whether there's anything that is even 
remotely comparable to iChat on the PC side -- if not, we could just 
say (without even exaggerating much), that if our service is to be 
delivered virtually, we require the quality of video we can get from 
iChat and nowhere else. But if the Windows folks have something as 
good, we're more likely to be faced with having to get a couple of PCs 
for us (uhhh... shudder).

Thoughts?

Scott