Skype’s 10-Way Video Calling Released

Got to love the idea of competition in the market. The quality of Skype is getting better and the price getting lower.

The VoIP company apparently has had a great success with their five-way beta group video-calling functionality — just recently released a new version of Skype 5.0 for Windows that supports ten-way group video calling now. No mention of the release date for MAC OS yet. So. Those Mac lover, hang in there.

Skype 5.0 beta two is already available for download; it includes 10-way video calls, automatic call recovery and a cleaner user interface. The update is also said to improve call quality and includes a number of bug fixes to make the overall experience much smoother.

This is an Awesome news for the industry. I believe that video calling is at an inflection point with the rapid deployment of broadband, the broad availability of connected screens and the progress in CPU and video compression technologies.

Over the next year or two, we’re going to see some incredible advances and possibly wars in this field – it already started with Google. Given Google voice is free, it will be interesting to see how ugly the war between the two services become.

The day is fast approaching when the ability to hold a video phone call (who knows what we’ll eventually call it) is taken for granted.

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