NetHosted Blog

With recent announcements by two of the biggest companies, namely Facebook and Google, both offering free to use video chat are these business behemoths going head-to-head in a Haye vs. Klitschko style world video chat unification bout? Well… no actually. Whilst the thought of it is an exciting prospect, much like the boxing match the reality is a much tamer affair.

Facebook have made it clear that group chat is not a priority for their video chat, citing the fact that one-on-one video chat is far more popular on Skype than group video chat, whilst that is  true they did gloss over the fact that group chat on Skype requires one member of the chat to have a subscription to Skype premium which is a monthly paid service. Facebook are bringing this feature to their users in partnership with Skype who no doubt helped a lot with their considerable video streaming expertise, the user experience is very streamlined with just a quick download required to get going. You can then invite any of your Facebook contacts to start a video chat and this starts up with minimal fuss, making this an extremely easy way to video chat and no doubt the first time many of it’s users will have tried video chat.

Google “Hangouts” is the catchy name for their video streaming service, this service however is designed with group chat in mind. It has an invites system which is rather too clunky for it to be useful for one-on-one conversations when compared to the simple alternative, it does exactly what is required though and group chat works smoothly.

So that is the two products, Facebook video chat is superb for talking to friends individually, and Google Hangouts is great for group video chat. These products aren’t currently fighting for market share, they serve different purposes and are both very effective at what they do. Whether this will be the case in future remains to be seen, it could well be that Facebook offer group video chat if Skype decide to remove the premium for this feature which is certainly possible.