Skype Gives In: Group Video Chat Now Free, Like Hangouts
Hurray for the free market and its few remaining giant members.Because of pressure from Google Hangouts, which has offered free group video calls for a while now, Skype has announced they'll begin rolling out free group video calls. Unfortunately they're starting with desktop clients first.
Lifehacker has a brief writeup here , with more information available via the Skype blog .
This is good news for me since I have an Android phone on which I've thus far completely avoided registering a Google account (though I was just about to, since I found out that you can do two-way Hangout chat with a GMail address but WITHOUT having to succumb to Google+).
This is a nice alternative for those who'd rather sell this part of their identities to Microsoft instead of Google, and who have still managed to avoid the incessant +ing of Google.
Score one for heterogeneity.
[Ed. note: Coincidentally, this comes very close on the heels of Google pulling back on Google+ and supposedly moving its Hangouts dev team to Android.]
Personally, I would prefer to pay Skype than have to join a Social Network, but this is the pressure of modern collaboration, you have to go where your colleagues are or you just look ludite.
Maybe this means I won't need to renew my Skype subscription to retain this feature. Unfortunately, they had it set up on auto-renew when I signed up, so I will have to check my preferences, which is something I frequently forget to check... thanks for the heads up in any case