Building a better video chat

Video chat services are popping up all over the mobile-sphere, prompted by better networks with the uplink capacity and low latency to support a two-way video stream. These primarily consumer services aren’t perfect--choppy feeds and delay are still regular occurrences—but they’re starting to establish themselves as the next peer-to-peer frontier in mobile communications. The problem is the market is fragmented to the point of schizophrenia.

With few exceptions, one developer’s or vendor’s app doesn’t communicate with another’s. Operator-driven solutions don’t support cross-carrier interoperability. There’s little integration with the handset itself with video chat clients sitting as isolated apps in the user interface instead of being grafted into the core calling functions of the device. The most successful implementation of video chat so far has been Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) FaceTime app, which allows users to move directly from voice into video calling. Still, FaceTime’s limitations today are greater than its benefits: the service works only between the latest generation of iPhones and it is restricted to WiFi networks.

Not only is there no carrier-class mobile video chat or video conferencing service, there is really no carrier video chat service at all. If the history of mobile peer-to-peer communications—voice, SMS, MMS, mobile instant messaging—is any indication, for video chat to take off it needs to be interoperable and deeply integrated into the communications features of the device. At Mobile World Congress last week, several vendors attempted to take that challenge head on, introducing products that solve some, if not all, of the problems of ubiquitous video communications.

The Syniverse ‘Trojan Horse’

The most aggressive of those vendors was Syniverse Technologies, which built on its legacy in SMS and MMS interoperability to create an interoperable video communications hub. At first glance, Syniverse’s hub looks like any other closed proprietary platform with a dedicated client and server. But Syniverse’s client is really just a Trojan Horse into the market, allowing Syniverse to sell a complete video communications solution to its customers while the market is still highly fragmented, explained Charles Landry, executive vice president of global messaging for Syniverse.

The real magic is in the video hub, which is designed to act as a central mediator for any video chat or collaboration service, Landry said. It’s designed to work with any vendor’s client and any service provider’s video service, creating a truly interoperable peer-to-peer service that bridges all disparate applications over both mobile and the traditional Internet, Landry said.

“We don’t think closed systems are the way to go,” Landry said. “Operators and device manufacturers learned their lessons from SMS. They learned their lessons from MMS.”

For instance, the hub could link into the application programming interfaces of a third-party application like Fring or Qik, allowing video chat between the two services as well as bridging video calls between either app and an operator’s own video chat service. It could route video calls between a Web or PC-based service such as Skype or Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) video chat to the mobile phone. It can even interconnect with another vendor’s proprietary media hub to allow cross-carrier video chat, Landry said.

Landry stressed that those are only examples. The platform was unveiled at Mobile World Congress and Syniverse has only begun to approach video chat app developers and vendors about integrating with their services. There’s a good chance that some of those providers will eschew any partnership with Syniverse in an effort to promote their own closed systems, Landry said—he didn’t name any names, but Apple would be a good guess—but he said he believes that market forces will ultimately push all services to interoperable platforms.

The first trial of the hub’s capabilities is going into Korea Telecom’s (NYSE:KT) network as a video broadcast solution. Called Show it, the service allows a KT user to send a live video feed from his or her phone to any Internet and media-player-enabled device in the world, using SMS, or e-mail to send a link that opens up a browser-based live stream. Landry said that as video communication clients make it into more handsets and those clients integrate with the video hub, Syniverse will be able to eliminate the link middleman completely, setting up and tearing down video sessions between handsets and the Web apps directly.

More: Aylus Networks and Device Integration