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What started as a thought about how Skype can get a market presence in the business sector has segwayed into some sound thinking about the relevance of Skype’s new wide band voice codec SILK.
Here’s a sampling from the comments section:
Tshai Levent-Levi
“I don’t think SILK has anything to do with businesses and everything to do with chipsets.
Skype needs to bring more ears to their solution, and as they practically rule consumer desktops these days, their best bet (besides businesses) is consumer electronics. To get there, they need chipset providers to support their super-great-widebandy-codec, which they can do by offering it to the VoIP community royalty free.
Once the codec is available on a large number of chipsets, it’s an easy matter to port the rest of their Skype protocol/application/service to these chipsets and to additional devices - including business-looking ones.”
Frank
“Regarding SILK, this is simply Skype’s “Super Wideband Audio Codec”, which they’re offering TO LICENSE to 3rd parties. 1) A codec is not a protocol such as SIP or IAX. It is simply a way of digitally encoding audio in this case. Polycom already has their own “HD Audio” codecs, so one would have to wonder why they’d want to encumber themselves with a license outside their control.”
Michael S Collins
“From a technology standpoint the FS devs were pretty much yawning about having Skype integration. Technologically speaking it’s pretty much just another protocol. After experiencing a 48kHz conference using FS + CELT, pretty much anything else is just pedestrian.”
My take on SILK is that it’s a win for Skype and a big opportunity for the Skype ecosystem. Skype’s got enough users to gain adoption from hardware manufacturers and with more hardware supporting Skype there will be inherently be more new customers for the ecosystem to sell into.
What’s your take?
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