Mobile video also ties into Skype's overall strategy to enable ubiquitous communications across devices. "Any computing device becomes a communications device with our software, whether it's a PC, a mobile phone, a TV set or even a refrigerator," he said. "The future is about sharing communications across these devices, which traditional voice networks are not designed to do."
GigaOm Pro says that video calls will grow from 600 million calls in 2008 to almost 30 billion calls by 2015. "We intend to lead that revolution," Silverman said.
And just as Skype and other VoIP clients have pioneered HD voice quality, they're likely to do the same for HD video telephony, says Slava Borilin, Asia VoIP expert for Spirit DSP.
"Video is already a third of Skype calls, and more people want to move to HD video - not full 1080i, maybe, but definitely 720p. And for the consumer, the difference between standard and HD video is more obvious than voice quality," Borilin says.
VoIP players will also have an easier time of implementing it than operators, Borilin adds. "For carriers, it's even harder to move to video calls because of the bandwidth required, while for internet companies, it costs almost nothing to them. So many of them are already moving to upgrade their video to 720p."
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