While latency and packet loss are arguably more important, Short said that Skype on TV would work on speeds as slow as 800kbps with HD calls possible on speeds as slow as 1.2Mbps.Īs well as currently being the only video calling service available on smart TVs, or so Skype claims, the service is improving all the time. Theo Short, product manager for Skype on TV, took us through the service, explaining that all calls are VGA quality as standard, switching up to higher resolutions (up to 720p) once the quality and speed of both connections has been established. We went along to Skype’s London HQ to get a demo of the most recent version of Skype on TV.
Where cameras don’t come built in to a TV, you can pick up an external camera like Logitech’s TV Cam HD or Sony’s Webcam for TV. LG, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic and TP Vision for Philips’s smart TV ranges all come with Skype pre-installed or available to download from each company’s respective app stores. The ubiquitous video calling service has been available on connected TVs in some form since 2011 and is now installed on over 200 million connected TVs across the world. If you’ve got a smart TV, chances are you’ve got Skype on there as well. While we might not have hoverboards and fax machines have no place in the modern home, we can make video calls with colleagues from our TV sets. Sci-fi movies are notoriously bad at predicting how things will turn out but Back to the Future II got it right with one thing.