VideoChat Is Getting More Mainstream

I caught a bit of Oprah yesterday at my mother-in-laws where we had Turkey Day a day early here in Silicon Valley. One of the segments features their use of Skype.

Today a story appears tied to ABC News about iChat and the use of it in video conferencing. Another story in the International Herald Tribue cites Rebecca Swensen of IDC who explains why webcams and video chat is growing.

Late last night a story appeared in ItBusiness out of Canada ran a story offering up a series of tips for using video conferencing, mentioning client SightSpeed.

What I'm seeing, and as I've previously posted about, is the growing trend to see more and more video conferencing entering the Web generation's daily life. This is being powered largely by the simple fact that more PCs have webcams and there's a desire to see who you've been chatting, emailing or talking with.

But there are other factors driving video conferencing or video chat uptake.

1. Greater penetration of broadband

2. Better quality, lower latency broadband

3. Faster processors on PCs

4. Laptops that do what desktops used to do

5. The launch of the Netbooks.

6. Better compression codecs for video and audio from client GIPS and others.

What's more, AMI-Partners says that there's also an nice uptick for video conferencing in the SMB space.