Comcast, Skype partnership could foster cheaper telepresence

Comcast and Skype announced that the two have struck up a deal to bring the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service to Comcast HDTVs. This could prove to be a lot more useful than just a video chat with relatives.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as so then as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He as well served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the research and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

Staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco. Earlier serving as a contributing editor at ZDNet in New York City for two years, she before worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has as well written for MainStreet.com, Irish America Magazine and the New York Daily News, among others. Rachel has a B.A. in Mass Communications and History from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she served as art director for the student magazine, Plated.

Skype users will be able to utilize most of the familiar functions of the desktop app. That consists of being able to make and receive Skype video and audio calls, as then as send messages - all through an HDTV connected to a Comcast adapter box.

Skype and Comcast subscribers will as well be able to make use of the same features on a compatible smartphone or tablet, nevertheless the recipient of these calls and messages only need the basic Skype set-up to communicate. Best of all, when using Skype on a Comcast-enabled HDTV, users can after all watch programming during making and answering calls - though it might get a bit loud and confusing with all of those audio feeds swirling around.

However, this collaboration has some real potential to produce a cheaper business-related, telepresence option as then. Small businesses or home offices with Comcast cable subscriptions can make extra use of their Internet plans by making cheaper conference calls. Maybe Skype will even permit free Skype-to-Skype video chatting on this medium, which would be especially friendly to the user’s budget.

Rachel King has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted in this blog.

...this site began as a subscription-based service called "ZiffNet" that offered computing information to CompuServe users.