TABLE OF CONTENTS 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...
