"Teleconferencing is inherently kind of a low-quality experience, especially in a consumer home. Skype already has over 521 million registered accounts, so there's a built-in audience who is already signed up and knows how to use it.īut the quality may not be what some people expect, says DisplaySearch analyst Paul Gagnon. And Skype likely won't be a brand new concept to a lot of those new TV owners. And of those, almost 42 percent recently purchased a Web-connected TV. consumerswho bought TVs in January found that 27.5 percent of them have connected their new sets to the Internet, either through the TV itself or via an external device such as a game console or digital video box, according to iSuppli. That includes accessing Internet radio and video streaming from services like Pandora and Netflix, and social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.Ī survey of 800 U.S. Consumer surveys show that people are beginning to buy Internet-connected TVs, which allow not just Skype calls, but also other activities on the TV that are normally confined to the computer. Now with major companies like Samsung, Panasonic, and LG pushing the idea of the TV as videophone, the concept does at least have the chance to catch on. Cisco also announced at CES it would be offering a home version of its telepresence software sometime this year, and did not yet mention a price. But the high cost of the fancy systems from companies like Cisco and Hewlett-Packard doesn't make them consumer-friendly. Today teleconferencing is a common tool for companies to put employees in different locations virtually, if not physically, in the same conference room. The idea, however, was at least on the right track: making videophones accessible to normal folk. Few ever signed up for the service because you had to reserve call times and pay a whopping $16 per minute. Unfortunately its 1960s videophone system, known as the Picturephone, was a bust. While Robida wrote about the idea, AT&T did the most to advance the idea from the pages of Victorian sci-fi to actuality. And not just any three TV makers, but the world's largest overall (Samsung sells practically one of every five TVs sold), the leader in plasmas (Panasonic), and LG, which is close behind Samsung, selling 15 percent of all TVs. By the time these models actually hit stores in late spring there should be three TV makers offering Skype on their TVs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |