Skype Beta – Five-Way Video Calling Released

A little while back, I wrote about Skype and how it is great for free, high quality voice and video calls to other people that also use the Skype service.

This week, Skype released a beta version of Skype into the wild that is capable of five-way video calling which is up from the usual two-way video calling normally available. At the moment, only Windows users are blessed with this new functionality leaving MacOS X, Linux and mobile customers out in the cold for the time being. Having said that, MacOS X users do have iChat that can manage up to four-way video conferencing so long as everyone has a Mac with iChat (until the iPhone and iPad inevitably become iChat capable).

Mashable has also reported that the honeymoon may be short-lived. If users are keen to keep using this feature then they may have to cough up for the privilege in three or four months time. As to how this will be structured remains to be seen but I am fairly sure the marketing people and the bean counters have done their homework.

I guess the issue now is finding five friends to give this thing a proper go. Personally, I can’t see myself using anything more than perhaps three-way video conferencing on the rarest of occasions. Having said that, businesses or heavy duty users may appreciate this feature far more than the casual user.