| Before we help you understand what you need to make video calls, let’s discuss the various
flavors of videoconferencing and outline the topics we focus on in this book so that you
have a clear understanding of the differences among the various videoconferencing solutions.
We divide these videoconferencing types into three categories:
■ Personal videoconferencing
■ Business videoconferencing
■ Web videoconferencing
These solutions can be software that you use with your computer, stand-alone hardware,
or combined software and hardware solutions.They all have one thing in common:
they allow you to make a video call of some sort using various features.
This book focuses primarily on personal videoconferencing solutions, or what we call video calls.
We use the term personal because these calls are usually between only two people—you and
the person you are communicating with. A video call, at minimum, is simply the communication
between two or more people who have both audio and a moving video image using
a computer, dedicated video telephone, or both. It may also include additional features such
as instant messaging (IM) and file transfers (FT), commonly found in many IM tools such as
Skype, iChat AV, MSN Messenger (MSN),Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM), and AOL
Instant Messenger (AIM).Though we will discuss business videoconferencing and Web
videoconferencing so that you can understand the basic differences among them, we focus
on personal videoconferencing solutions, from here on referred to simply as video calls.This
will help simplify what we are addressing in this book: the ability of making video calls
between two people to better communicate and enhance the communication experience. |
