Friday, September 23, 2011

Skype For TV

I've been using Skype for a while now. At first for video conferencing, but now I use Skype (or gtalk) to make all of my phone calls since I said adiós to AT&T.

From the first time I ever used Skype, I wanted to use it from the living room on a large screen TV. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of otb solutions for that at the time.


Now, you can purchase an expensive HD TV or Blu-ray player with Skype built-in, or become a Comcast customer and rent a set-top box from them. Or, every time I want to use Skype on my TV I could haul my laptop over and connect and disconnect cables and what-not. I think there is even a hack to make it work on an Apple TV. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent hack for Roku or Boxee.

So I thought it'd probably be easy to just build an inexpensive prototype of a Skype set-top box using OEM parts, install Linux and write some software that uses the Skype API. Maybe there's even a niche market for one of those, so I put up a simple site to do some market research: SkypeForTV.com http://rsg.io/bO0HN.

UPDATE:

Skype sent me a C&D for the domain SkypeForTV.com (interesting how that domain redirects to bing.com now that MS bought Skype), so I moved the poll to here, however it looks like Skype had an even bigger reason for me to take down my poll, they were working on their own version of the set-top box.

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