Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Skype group video calling becomes free

blogs.skype.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 169 posts

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#101

Post by unreal37 »

finkin1 wrote: post #37
gum_ina_package wrote: post #7

Finally! I don't know anyone who likes G+ over Skype, but we all use it for the group video features.

I'm the CEO of a small remote-working startup with 5 employees. I pay $20/mo for Skype since some of people I meet with only use that and I need the group screen sharing feature. Whenever I have a Skype meeting, I'm nervous, because 50% of the time video or screen sharing won't work. Once I get them to switch to Hangouts there's no problems, ever. Are you telling me that you experience the opposite? If so, that's ver…

I've never really had a good G+ Hangout video call. The video from others is always so terrible. I used Skype Video for years, to remote parts of the world even, and had few problems.

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#104

Post by innoying »

calbear81 wrote: post #95
jamra wrote: post #91

I use Skype everyday to communicate with family abroad. I have a camera mounted on my television. The quality of Skype is abysmal. Most of the time, you do not have HD video. When I switch over to using facetime, the video quality is amazing. I don't know what happened to Skype, but its quality is by far the worst available on the market.

Yeah, I don't know what the heck is wrong with Skype either. On video calls, the quality is lacking most of the time and even though we're both on fast broadband connections, the "call quality" is still a 3 out of 5 bars. Switch to Google Hangouts and everything works fine with a lot less connectivity issues.

The problem is Skype recently moved to a centralized infrastructure instead of a P2P which has caused terrible issues for pretty much everybody. Allegedly this was done to allow the NSA to snoop on conversations easier.

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#105

Post by hiharryhere »

yawz wrote: post #70
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Sococo for teams (I work at Sococo). No scheduling conferences (talk/view any time they're available); integrated video/chat/doc sharing; can tell who's talking to whom/who's not busy/who has their door shut.

Thanks for the reference. I'll definitely check it out. That's what I like with Sqwiggle (or similar tools). It's the ease of connecting with a team member using video. (I'm just noticing something: I forgot to mention that AFAIK Sqwiggle doesn't support group conferencing.). Your connection/team member is a click away and you know if they're at their desk thanks to the snapshots.

With sqwiggle you can group conference a bunch of people by clicking everyone. You all get joined. Pretty neat.

Unfortunately the way it reacts to changes in bandwidth isn't up to hangouts or skype. We've got one team member working out in the sticks and it just drops out when his bandwidth gets choked. Hangouts on the other hand just falls back gracefully to audio only.

If we all had better connections sqwiggle would be more of a contender.

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#106

Post by junto »

finkin1 wrote: post #37
gum_ina_package wrote: post #7

Finally! I don't know anyone who likes G+ over Skype, but we all use it for the group video features.

I'm the CEO of a small remote-working startup with 5 employees. I pay $20/mo for Skype since some of people I meet with only use that and I need the group screen sharing feature. Whenever I have a Skype meeting, I'm nervous, because 50% of the time video or screen sharing won't work. Once I get them to switch to Hangouts there's no problems, ever. Are you telling me that you experience the opposite? If so, that's ver…

We use Skype chat as a daily tool to keep the team (a few remote) up-to-date. We have daily standup using a proper mic so the remotes can hear properly.

I find the screen sharing feature in Skype to be poor quality. We tend to use Skype for calls, and then join.me for screen sharing.

We sometimes have call quality problems on Skype too. We also switch to hangouts for this reason, and we are often surprised how good the call quality, video quality and screen share quality is on hangouts.

Only problem is that nobody can figure out how to login or start a hangout. The interface is damn awful. They need a simple app like Skype's that installs like Chrome does, and give me history for gods sake. How hard is that to deliver?

One of the reasons I shy away from hangouts, is that I use Skype to backfill my timesheet. I can see exactly what calls, video calls, chats I made going back to 2006 on Skype's history. Admittedly so can the NSA, but still, the feature is awesome from a work perspective.

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#107

Post by rdl »

andrewfong wrote: post #98
rdl wrote: post #61

I don't understand why Microsoft took so long to do this. If they had been faster after Google Hangouts, it never would have gained a beachhead. Xbox One could easily find a secondary market as a conference room device; a Microsoft version of Airplay and Chromecast (ideally open to Mac and general web as well) would take more engineering, but would have been awesome too.

> If they had been faster after Google Hangouts, it never would have gained a beachhead. That's why Microsoft took so long to do this. They had little incentive to do so until others did, and even when the writing on the wall was clear, they still faced the innovator's dilemma.

Innovator's dilemma matters if you're actually making money from your current product. Skype isn't in any way material to Microsoft's revenues, but is an important mindshare property (and could tie in to other Microsoft tools; integration on WP and Windows desktops, etc.)

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#109

Post by gregcohn »

spankalee wrote: post #73
atonse wrote: post #5

Funny - because just last week I setup new dummy google plus accounts for various family members in Europe and India so we could use hangouts without polluting our regular gmail accounts with Google+ nonsense. We won't need that anymore - We were perfectly happy with Skype, but missed group video.

I work for Google, so I'm obviously biased here, though I don't always like everything we do around our sites and integration. But, I'm genuinely curious, what nonsense does Google+ pollute your regular Google account with? I believe that you get a profile page, but you can leave it entirely blank.

If you're seriously asking, I'm happy to answer my two cents, but i'm very concerned that you don't have a sense for the reasons people would want to use G+ gated products without being part of G+.

As someone who has a personal G+ account and doesn't mind, and who runs a company that pays Google for apps for my domain on which we manage our email, I still had to register for G+ to be able to use the hangouts product in invitations and threads I'm having with my work email. Now that I've done so (without adding a profile photo or anything else), i'm getting tons of people adding me to circles, etc., which I don't want. It's essentially forcing a social-connection construct on a relationship with an empty profile that I don't want to create or have to maintain.

Re: Skype group video calling becomes free

#110

Post by Consultant32452 »

why-el wrote: post #54
_wmd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Skype since although it has always been a huge CPU hog, its UI is perfect for beginners (i.e. family) and in the decade I've used it, I've never once been cross-sold some pointless feature the parent company are currently trying to promote. Note Hangouts itself once was Gtalk, which I was a user of, prior to the first cattle herding on to Google+. Now Gundotra is out the door, there is no telling into which…

Really good point on Skype being friendly to beginners. I never realized it but my parents get really uncomfortable when I try to walk them over how to set up Google Hangout, and most of the time the conversation just continues on Skype and we drop the experiment. I mean for them its a hassle to install all those plugins and then invite and open emails and confirm and whatnot.

I'm a professional programmer that went to engineering school and I can't be fussed to start up hangouts with anyone. It seems like it takes a full 30 minutes to get everyone in the same hangout and I always feel like a buffoon for suggesting.
Post reply on HN