This memorial weekend, I went to see the Hangover 2. We sat in a theatre filled to the brim with deafening forced laughter. A plot that’s familiar is fine; a plot that blatantly panders to the audience without offering anything new or refreshing is kind of insulting.
Anyway, somewhere between all the carbon-copy scenes, we get to the part when Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, bids farewell to his new monkey friend.
"I wish monkeys could Skype, maybe one day?”
Thank goodness Alan said that because it distracted me from thinking about the current state of Hollywood.
Skype has been making many appearances in the blogosphere lately. For one reason or another, stories about Skype alternatives have been popping up left and right; most of them are just lists of services that don’t do half of what Skype does.
Let me be one of the first to tell you that currently there is no single service I know of that does all that Skype can do in the way that Skype does it. Like it or not, there is no free voice and video calling (with IM), desktop and file sharing service + application bundle (which gives you the option of PSTN access) that is as easy to use as Skype.
The good news, though, is that there are some up-and-comers you should be aware of, and plenty of flexible options for what the majority of Skype users really care about, video chatting (I’m almost 100% sure that when Alan was talking about Skyping with the monkey, he was referring to the video calling component of the service).
SIP for free video calling
SIP is nowhere near as ubiquitous as Skype. The acronym is rather unfortunate, actually. You can say “Skype me”, but throw out a “SIP me” and you are bound to get some disapproving looks.
Nevertheless, SIP does nearly everything that Skype does. Best of all, it’s based on an open standard whereas Skype is proprietary nearly all the way through. This means that there is ample room for SIP integrations in the future, and that you can use SIP on just about every SIP standard based device or application on the market.
Here’s just one example of how you can get video chat for free using SIP. Get on SIP is our free service that anyone can use to get a free SIP account. Users simply need to plug in their account credentials into any SIP client (phone, app, mobile app, etc) that does video calling, and you can make as many video calls as you want to anyone in the world with a SIP account by dialing their SIP address. One example of a free SIP client is Jitsi. Like Skype, many SIP clients use HD video codecs (H.264) so video call quality is just as good.
According to Todd Carothers from Counterpath, a new version of the popular Bria application for iOS and Android will include video calling, which will make Bria one of the first standards-based video calling applications on those operating systems. Todd informed the VUC (VoIP Users Conference) that this major update would drop this summer.
You’ll notice I stress ‘standards-based’ a lot, and here’s why: Facetime on the iPhone 4 is a great selling point, but it is purposely limited. In fact, it was so limited when it was first announced that Apple was able to make a huge deal each time Facetime was ‘enabled’ on another Apple device. It’s proprietary tech just like Skype, which means that once you’re in, you’re really locked in. Same plot, different company.
Is this smart from a business perspective? Maybe. Time will tell. Is it good from an end user or developer perspective? Absolutely not.
By using SIP, you bypass all of the obstacles put in front of you by device restrictions, OS restrictions, and brand restrictions. Video calls between standards based SIP clients are designed to work regardless of who the manufacturer or developer is.