During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell
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Panasonic launches a 50-inch Skype client
SPEAKING face to 50-inch face will be possible later this year thanks to Panasonic, but only if you buy one of its latest 3D TVs and a $200 webcam.
Along with its V20 and V25 series of HD 1080p 3D TVs, Panasonic announced partnerships with Skype, Youtube and Twitter among others. However it most heavily promoted its association with Skype.
Skype CEO Josh Silverman was on hand to lend some marketing spin at the press conference yesterday, touting the popularity of video calling on Skype. According to his figures, a third of all calls made on Skype are video chats. He wasn't quite as forthcoming as to what percentage of calls are SkypeOut, however.
Essentially Panasonic has implemented a Skype client within its walled-garden Viera Cast system. There's no real difference between making and receiving calls using Skype on your PC and on a Panasonic Viera telly. Calls can also be ignored if the viewer is engrossed in a film or TV show. However after that things start to go a bit south.
Should you accept the call, there's no picture-in-picture for either party, so you are automatically punted off whatever you were watching and end up face-to-face with your caller. Panasonic didn't say why picture-in-picture isn't available but we can make some educated guesses.
Skype is a resource hog at best. Panasonic says that Skype video will be up to 720p quality, which is great until you realise what demands that will place on both CPU usage, for encoding and decoding of sound and video, and bandwidth. Even a fairly brawny late model PC will start to break a sweat if you Skype call with video at high quality. So a television that will have to do all that plus some more for the primary sound and picture feed might not have the raw processing power or could start to have heat issues, should the chips inside be able to cope.
It would be harsh to call the innards of the Panasonic V20 and V25 TVs inadequate but unlike Samsung's and Toshiba's units the Panasonic Viera TVs won't be able to convert 2D content to 3D either.
The Panasonic representative said picture-in-picture will be available in the future, but if the current limitation is hardware then expect to get hit with an expensive replacement cycle a year or so down the line.
Things get even less stellar when you realise that the video camera required for this is an additional $200 item over and above the base cost of the TV set itself. Not only are you shelling out for a high-end 3D telly that could be outdated by the end of the year but you're also having to buy a USB webcam at over-the-odds pricing.
Panasonic also announced that it will be partnering with DirecTV in the US and sponsoring three 3D TV channels there. However what is clear from both yesterday's announcement by Samsung and talking to Panasonic representatives is that television vendors will have to work with content producers in order to create content and demand for these wallet busters.
Of course if you are without 3D content you can always wait for someone to call you on Skype, if you don't mind moving away from Corrie that is. µ
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The camera does the video encoding in the camera hardware and outputs an already encoded steam for the TV to transfer over the internet. That is why it is expensive and how the TV can handle this when it is so much less powerful than your computer processor. Do more research next time article writer.
I have a Panasonic 42" Plasma, and the internet, and video calling is great on that, but the computer handles the load. One wonders how resource hog skype ( will it use the chips memory to aid the overall skype system ? ) and the new 3D, will perform well all at the same time, when one or the other may give problems to the set as a whole ? Why could not skype come up with a box itself with a USB port, and ethernet connection so it can just suck of that boxes chip, and leave everything else alone ? I use oovoo for the reason that it does not take YOUR computer power, and add it toward the whole skype network, and the free version looks, and sounds great on the big screen TV. I think this is a potential stumble by Panasonic as they should have concentrated on making the best 3D set out there, if they fail on that, people will blame the skype feature.
Or make the remote control a microphone or portable webcam?
WiFi webcam might be the answer.
Maybe we can get proper videophone one our Mobile Phones for a reasonable price? Are video calls even included in price plans?
@bogie, an Arm chip could possibly encode/decode 720p video and audio streams, but it can't encrypt/decrypt it for Skype quick enough. Not yet...
It still use smoke signal... what about that, Chucky?
My phone is way off and I still hate when it rings, so now it's gonna ring on my favorite show? Damn...
Make something more useful, like something that turns hearing off!
Its about time they started integrating phones with TV's. Holding a handset is so 20th century. I'm sure an arm ship could handle the encoding/decoding, if not there's always the cell chip that is going to be in a toshiba TV soon.
I would expect that the "you're also having to buy a USB webcam at over-the-odds pricing." would also contain some pretty advanced microphony. Handling living room distances is very demanding from an acoustic viewpoint - the telly vendors and Skype can't have ignored that. I hear that Skype's audio engineering is at the tip of state-of-the-art, so an educated guess would be that most of the extra cost would relate to audio, not video, and be irreplaceable to make talking to your telly work...