Skype Journal: New law highlights a huge Video market....
March 28, 2005 04:43 PMA lot of Skypers want video. Many though wonder why video is important. For 34 million kids in America who have a parent living in a different city video conferencing can be a miracle. Lawmakers in Utah passed the first Virtual Visitation Law in the United States. And it looks like Wisconsin will be next.
Skyper Michael Gough "mgough" is president for a group pushing for video visitation rights.
This sounds like a excellent real-world application for Skype and other VoIP systems. Currently Michael uses SightSpeed for video and Skype for audio.
Michael shared with me three critical functions necessary for vendors to be successful in this market sector-
1. Security. Parents must be able to limit what access their child has to other users. For Skype this means a child should not be able to access the privacy options. Currently they can. Can we get parental control for this option? This is of paramount importance in a court is going to approve video visitation privledges.
2. Freedom to place the video pics any where on the monitor the user wants and at any size they want. This functionality is easily understood when you watch the different activities a parent and child share during a visitation. Sharing a book, showing off a missing tooth, waving, throwing a kiss... all require flexibility of positioning and sizing the pics; and trading off resolution and framerate.
The image size is also important for grandparents. For the vision impaired resolution is not the key issue. Big counts.
3. Support for the hearing impaired: Grandma is an important player in this blended-family market. Voice to text captioning is needed.
We will have more to say as this story unfolds over the coming weeks. An aging population and the growing multi-parent dispersed family are the drivers for Video Conferencing. Developers who understand demographics may have more power than those who understand technology.
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