Skype coming soon to Sony BRAVIA and VIZIO VIA TVs
Last year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), we ushered in a new era of face-to-face communications with the introduction of Skype-enabled TVs. This year at CES, we're making further strides in the living room by making it even easier to get Skype on your TV.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of a play that opened a year ago: at CES 2010, the New York Times covered the venture of integrating Skype into the family room, when Skype-enabled TVs debuted on the show floor. At CES 2011, Skype is widening that footprint from a first wave of sets to two more major brands — Sony BRAVIA and VIZIO VIA — turning a novelty demo into a multi-vendor category.
The announcement also caps a busy stretch for Skype: it confirmed a series of CES video announcements in late December, days after adding free video calling to its iPhone app over WiFi and 3G — and just weeks after a December 2010 peer-to-peer network outage took the service down globally before dedicated supernodes restored roughly 90 percent of normal volumes.
First-order effects
- Owners of Sony BRAVIA and VIZIO VIA connected TVs gain a path to living-room video calling on brands beyond the original Skype-enabled lineup announced at CES 2010.
- Skype arrives at CES 2011 with momentum across three screens at once — TV sets, iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, and the previously reported Skype-Verizon arrangement on handsets.
Second-order effects
- Other TV makers face pressure to match Skype integration as a table-stakes connected-TV feature, echoing how Sony itself once weighed Skype on hardware — Nikkei reported in January 2008 that Sony would add Skype to the PSP, later covered via Reuters.
- Camera and peripheral makers gain a growing attach market, since video calling on these sets depends on add-on accessories rather than built-in hardware.
Third-order effects
- If every screen becomes a video-calling endpoint, the living room competes with the desk as a communications venue — and always-on TV usage puts load patterns on Skype's rebuilt peer-to-peer infrastructure that its recent outage made a live question.
- Connected-TV platforms are consolidating into distribution channels where a software brand like Skype negotiates per-manufacturer deals, the same model that carried it onto handhelds since the 2008 PSP-era speculation covered by Engadget.
The trend: Video calling is migrating off the PC onto every nearby screen — phones first, then televisions — with CES serving as the annual staging ground for each expansion wave.