Peter Csathy, the CEO of SightSpeed, posted this picture on his blog today along with the following message: "While others don't even have multi-party video chat, we decided to up the ante to 9. And, we ain't done yet."

So what do the folks at SightSpeed have in mind? They did also launch their SightSpeed Light widget on hi5 as well, but I'm sure it's more than that. Maybe some better firewall traversal than bog-standard SIP provides? Maybe video quality that approaches Skype's high-quality offering?

But back to the question of 9 users at once. I have to imagine that, like with a four-way call on SightSpeed, a nine-way call goes through a central server at SightSpeed. I also have to imagine that managing that many video callers at once becomes somewhat challenging. It also could very well be distracting to see all those faces at once.

In any case, I'm looking forward to trying it out for myself. Question is: do I know 8 other people willing to try this at the same time?