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AOL To Charge for AIM Videoconferences
gwoodrow writes "In some of my college computer classes, we discussed the necessity of some sort of profit to be made eventually from major software. AIM was often sited as a rare example of a large company offering up a free service that generated almost no profit whatsoever. Well, that's all changing. It seems that AOL will begin charging for both voice and video conferencing services via the buddy list. Some AIM addicts are surely getting worried that AOL may eventually charge for regular usage."
The article doesn't say anything about charging for video. AOL is introducing a conference call service (like a group chat, only for voice) that they will be charging money for. Now they say you'll be able to integrate video with these conference calls, which sounds cool, but nothing users can currently do free will now cost money
I don't think it's a rumor...they quote an AOL veep named Edmund Fish liberally in the article.
IIRC... a company that has revenue based on ads can typically lose about 1000 to 5000 and sometimes even as many as 10,000 costumers, if one of those customers stays and pays. Of course this all depends on the subscription rate but if thats true then AOL probably has nothing to worry about.
Regards,
Steve
If it were the standard voice/video conferencing AIM provides now, the clients negotiate direct connects through the server, so AOL could simply keep track of when direct connects are started.
However, according to the article, this won't be the same as what they're doing now. Instead, AOL's partnering with third-party companies for [telephone] conference calls and videoconferencing services.
Jabber.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Right now it means NOTHING.... everyone is jumping to conclusions instead of RTFA'ing (shrug, I feel new here).
They are taking services from two other providers (I've used WebEx, it's a decent web conference) and allowing them to initiate a voice and/or web conference (multiple particpants). This is a new service for AOL and does not effect a one on one conversation or video conference in any way.
It doesn't matter, this is a NEW service for AOL that allows multi-user voice and web conference. It doesn't affect one on one iChat...
I'll start using Jabber again when it stops being the source of the majority of my IM spam.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Congratulations America - Antitrust law is now as worthless as the paper it's printed on!
A provision of the original terms of the AOL/Time Warner merger was the AOL would have to open it's AIM protocol before it implemented voice/video services:
In a January 11, 2001 statement by FCC Chairman William E. Kennard, upon AOL's merger with Time Warner, the FCC noted that "We require AOL to interoperate with competing instant messaging (IM) providers before it can offer videoconferencing and other streaming video over IM. This condition guards against AOL's ability to leverage its existing dominance in current IM into the broadband IM marketplace."
The FCC never followed through on this - and now AOL is officially offering voice/video and charging for it to boot. So go ahead enormous corporations! Merge to your hearts content! Merge up and down the supply chain, across competitors, whatever you want - Its all good! We'll slap provisions on you to pretend we're protecting the marketplace but won't enforce them!
Remember last week's column on abolishing the FCC? Maybe it deserves a second look at this point . . .
Yep, that and the damn commercials my cable company has been shoving down my throat to try to disuade me from switching to satelite. They are so full of BS and outright lies that I threatened to leave them if they didn't stop showing the ads and had all my friends do the same. They scaled the ads WAY back but unfortunatly didn't stop em.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
video and audio do not cost AOL any additional bandwidth over what they are already giving out to subscribers and in the event that two non-AOL AIM users have a video/voice converstaion the cost to AOL is no more than what they already expend to run the list servers. Arbitrarily charging users a per use fee on software that uses bandwidth that they have already paid for in their monthly access fee is a non-starter.
AIM was often sited as a rare example of a large company offering up a free service that generated almost no profit whatsoever.
And it would seem that those classes have not included english yet.
Uh, wrong. You can video chat between AIM and iChat, it's just audio that doesn't work right now...
According to http://www.apple.com/ichat, iChat AV 2.1 supports videoconferencing with the new AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 for Windows, giving you immediate access to the millions of people in both the Mac and PC communities.
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
There is no Mac AOL for broadband client. Thusly, if one did happen to use a Mac and wanted to use, oh say, AIM for videoconferencing, folks cannot. Thusly, the musing about cross-platform iChat support does come into play.
This is already happening in many countries. While I was in Turkey, every movie was preceded by cellular sevice commercials, hair care products, beer, cigarettes, and the usual movie previews. Then the middle of the movie was punctuated by intermission. There were no commercials, but static ads. It's only a matter of time before that idea leaks to more parts of the worls.
I don't know if you mean "ads" or commecials, as you seem to be from Australia.
Since forever, we've always had "adds" before the trailers start. These ads are little more than slideshows showing some local store or restaurant. Then, there MIGHT be a movie-service related or something (like a moviefone or something). But those were it.
However, starting a year of so ago, they starting throwing full-blown commercials, most you'd get from TV. Like Levis jeans, Noxema skin lotion, Cable-access tv shows. Etc.
Again, you could be talking about the same exact thing existing in Australia (and "ads" being just a culture / language gap). But I'm guessing the 25+ year remark means you MIGHT just be talking about the ads or slideshows.
AOL and Apple are partnering on iChat. Strategic partnering usually means cooperating so that standards (like cross-platform AIM video) carry through to the partners. That's not the case.
Really?
I picked up my screen name in the aol 2.5 days. Canceled the service a little over 6 months ago(would've done it earler, but my family used their AOL account as their primary email)
My screen name still works.
-Bucky
PSI is as easy a client to setup as AIM, and significantly easier than ICQ. All you need is a login server, name, and password, and PSI can create all of those for you on jabber.org if you like. Jabber's XML specification makes it much easier to debug than when something goes wrong with MSN. Setting up a Jabber server is not trivial, but it's also not required... You can always use the main centralized server. On the other hand, if you want security, you want your own server, and Jabber is the only one which can deliver that (and which is why most enterprise IM solutions are thinly masked layers upon a basic jabber implementation.)
Anyways, Trillian doesn't support Jabber (at least, the free version doesn't). Well, yes. But the 15 dollar version does, and is actually quite good at it. I've been using the paid version happily for months. There's not much additional to the paid version except for Jabber, but Trillian is a significant enough piece of software that it deserves support.
The ______ Agenda
Not to refute your prediction, but on a recent trip to Turkey I too caught a movie. I also was surprised to see an intermission, but they didn't show any ads.
I think it's standard to have intermissions there. I doubt they stopped the film to show ads. They probably just took advantage of the break. Anybody more familiar with the region have extra insight?
some links:
3 -January/002541.html
http://www.myjabber.net/
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-jabber
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jabber-VoIP_Client/
http://www.jabber.org/pipermail/standards-jig/200
The beauty of Jabber/XMPP tho is that there is the possibility of gatewaying to things such as SIP, so you can have the best of both worlds while maintaining a single protocol on the Jabber/XMPP side, so there is no need to worry too much about what will become the dominant voice protocol since there is the possibility of interoperability.
"Same boat here. I actually timed the commercials at over 20 minutes at one of the last movies I was at."
A theater in Portland was recently sued for that. Sadly, I don't remember the details, but I do remember a sharp decline in the number of commercials in the beginning. It's at the 10 minute mark.
I'd be less annoyed by the commercials if they kept the lights a bit brighter so I could creep in about 10 minutes after the movie's about to start.
"Derp de derp."
Hover over a buddy in AIM and you'll see what capabilities the other person has available to them, e.g. chat, video etc. I assume that AIM would be smart enough to grey out options that were not applicable for the person you had selected.
Nothing will happen to iChat, since this article has nothing to do with anything iChat, or current AIM users on any platform, can do. One-on-one text, audio, and video chat are not affected. This is a NEW service, for "business", that would be targetted at multiple-user videoconferences, integrating meeting technologies from Lightbridge and WebEx. They'll simply be using the AIM buddy list and presence system to initiate contact. Perhaps a new version of AIM will even integrate the feature. But it does NOT affect anything you can currently do with iChat and/or AIM.
Whether you think this is a sign of things to come - that AOL might start charging for formerly free AIM-related services in the future - is a different story...but that's extremely unlikely, since people currently use AIM from all sorts of devices, and would bail from AIM in droves. This proposed charge is for the NEW business-targetted conferencing and meeting services ONLY.
Damn misleading writeup. They are NOT charging for their existing video service, they are creating a "new paid service" directed torward business customers. Before I RTFA'd this article had me worried that I wouldn't be able to chat Mac to PC anymore (the other alternatives before AIM iChat were crap).
The new service is a video conference and web meeting, not a 1 to 1 video chat.