HD video calls coming up next
Everything is going HD, even in the mobile industry. Some time ago we explained you about the new way for the telecom operators to bring quality to their customers - the HD voice, based on the AMR Wideband technology. It enables high-quality voice calls in mobile networks. Now it seems natural for the future step to be HD video calls.
Video telephony is already around for several years with the Skype's video function and through 3G as well. As Skype CEO Josh Silverman announce to the audience during CommunicAsia 2010, video calls accounted for 34% of Skype-to-Skype calls in 2009. "That means that if you look at figures from TeleGeography showing that 12% of all international voice calls in 2009 were Skype calls, that means that 4% of international calls included video," Silverman said.
The next frontier is mobile, and Skype is already exploring that space with Skype Mobile Video for the Nokia N900, which enables Skype video calls over Wi-Fi or 3G to other N900 devices or to PCs, and later to flatscreen TVs with embedded Skype clients, Telecomasia generalize. And as the mobile video through Skype gets more and more popular, and as Skype and other VoIP clients have already pioneered HD voice quality, they're likely to do the same for HD video telephony.
"Video is already a third of Skype calls, and more people want to move to HD video - not full 1080i, maybe, but definitely 720p. And for the consumer, the difference between standard and HD video is more obvious than voice quality," , says Slava Borilin, Asia VoIP expert for Spirit DSP.
For now it is even easier for the VoIP players to implement it than for the mobile operators, Borilin adds. "For carriers, it's even harder to move to video calls because of the bandwidth required, while for internet companies, it costs almost nothing to them. So many of them are already moving to upgrade their video to 720p."
Comments
You have to login to comment! If you do not have an account you can register here !