Back in 1964, attendees of the New York World’s Fair could
go to the AT&T pavilion and play with a futuristic gadget: the Picturephone.
A caller could use a rather clunky phone receiver to view another caller on a
small, somewhat murky black-and-white screen. (I’m old enough to have attended
the fair and witnessed it firsthand.) It was another in a long line of attempts
to whet public appetite for a videophone, a concept that has intrigued
inventors as far back as Alexander Graham Bell.
Fast-forward to today and the long-held notion of the
videophone is taking shape in a unique way. Comcast is rolling out a Skype TV
product that uses the popular Internet video service to put callers on their
big-screen TV.
Skype on Xfinity is available to Comcast Xfinity triple-play
customers for $9.95 per month and a Skype account. It comes with a
self-installation kit that includes an adapter, a video camera and a remote with
a keyboard, which enables instant messaging while watching TV.
Skype, which launched its Internet service in 2003 and was
acquired by Microsoft last year for $8.5 billion, offers retail TV cams for
video calling on HDTVs and Blu-ray players, and Skype TV is available through certain
smart TV models. Skype offers premium services but its basic Internet video calling service remains free.
Therein lies the marketing challenge. Comcast is promoting
its Skype TV offer by playing up the benefits of big-screen video calling for
families who want to see each other in life-like HDTV, and friends who can
watch a show together remotely. In this age of social media and ubiquitous cameras,
perhaps people now are more willing to put their faces on a video screen. Has
the videophone finally arrived?
See how Comcast is promoting Skype on Xfinity:
Find out why one avowed skeptic likes Skype on cable:
In 1910, a French artist imagined what video telephony would
be like in the year 2000 (by Villemard, source: Wikipedia)
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