Skype Launches Video Calling On iPhone, Finally

Skype Video Calling iPhone

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s come just in time, after one of the worst weeks in Skype’s history: the P2P telephony giant’s newest iOS app now lets Skype users on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices make video calls to other Skype users for free.

“Free”, of course, is a slightly relative term: if you use the video calling service over 3G, you need to either have an unlimited plan, or at least enough data in your monthly allowance, to cover the call.

Still, on balance, Skype’s new service is a bit of a kick in the face for Facetime, Apple’s own video calling application: that service is still only available over WiFi or fixed broadband, and not 3G.

The news of more calling capabilities for Skype, aimed at some of the application’s most avid users, comes not a moment too soon: Christmas week — traditionally one of the busiest times of the year for Skype — the company experienced a mammoth service interruption, caused by a failure of the company’s supernodes, part of the peer-to-peer architecture that is used to transmit Skype’s data traffic.

(On that subject, ordinary paying subscribers who were affected by the outage were issued credit slips for 30 minutes of calls, worth about $1. Business users may be getting different compensation. A Skype spokesperson has confirmed that Skype for Business users, at this point, will not be getting anything more than this.)

Since being introduced in January 2006, video calling has proven to be one of the most popular features on Skype: in the first half of 2010, Skype says that 40 percent of all Skype minutes were spent on video calls.

That percentage is sure to get a boost with today’s news, since Skype is already so popular with iPhone users: before the announcement Skype was already one of the top five free iPhone apps of 2010.

Skype says that “at any given time” there are 25 million people logged on to its network.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t, however, the first phone to get Skype video calling capabilities. Matthew Miller at ZDNet notes that Nokia’s N900 was already enabled for this service seven months ago.

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