After a Royal Wedding, is it easy for YouTube to become a video call service?

GoogleTalk video calls are now an Android app, as are Skype’s Qik video calls. But these are just milestones on the way to a new platform for video calling.

YouTube started with an asynchronous experience. Millions of files being uploaded, slowly. Prepared for different screens, slowly. Cached in content distribution networks, slowly. Watched on demand.

They’ve had many experiments with streaming live video, perhaps going back further than the October 2009 live-streamed U2 concert. 2011’s Royal Wedding was YouTube’s most-watched live stream. This means they had to upload one stream, instantly. Transcode for different screens, live. And cache and distribute live streams simultaneously across all regions.

Millions of live viewers, so, nicely done.

Is YouTube ready for the next challenge? To turn YouTube into a live video calling, conferencing, and casting service?

I’ve asked video and VoIP professionals about this for two years. Everyone says there are three challenges: addressing, connection and latency. Can YouTube users perform people search efficiently and accurately? Can you connect people promptly, grabbing attention so people answer a call? And can you stream the voice and video with less than a tenth of a second delay, so people don’t notice the lag? Industry people say these are hard, especially latency. No doubt. But I have confidence that Google’s commitment and resources can meet the challenge.

When the Google Voice team nails these problems, they are free to innovate user experience and market applications. To build live conversation into Google properties. To offer live conversation as a platform for AdWords advertisers. To define video as the default Android calling mode. To make your Google identity more important than your phone number.

Where does that leave Skype? Will they launch a cloud Skyping platform before Google? Will it be as compelling for today’s users and developers as the first Skype desktop clients were in the Summer of 2003? I know they aspire to a new degree of awesome.

Yet it probably won’t come down to quality or design. Network effects attract users, so the people you want to talk to or work with are within the network. Network effects trump product quality and user experience. Multiply network effects by the ability to reach people in the network. So can your network offer dialtone all day, everywhere, in every context?

Android gives Google an edge in network dialtone, always on in your pocket. Skype will have to be strategically awesomer to beat that.