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Comment by tvon | Hacker News Reader

Jobs: "we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard."

Should be interesting.

That was easily the most interesting part of the keynote to me (Android user). I already assumed that video calling from Apple would push something similar forward in the rest of the phone community, but the fact that they're going to make it an open standard is phenomenal.

Of course, we'll see what they mean by "open standard" after the recent debacle with Safari's "HTML5 Demo", but I'd like to remain optimistic. Webkit was a nice gift, and hopefully this will be something similar.

They have to. It will be dead otherwise, based on the current prerequisites (iOS4 to iOS4, only on wifi)

I seem to recall he said the "only on wifi" was a temporary thing - while "we work with cell carriers" (I noted the plural: carrierS).

I have to wonder how long it will take to work out with AT&T. Skype and tethering took a year for AT&T to get around to.

Hello from outside America; we don't have AT&T.

Hello from inside America; you don't really want AT&T.

It's actually based on already existing open standards, see http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/06/apple-...

True, but being based on open standards doesn't necessarily mean that the end result won't have anything proprietary in it. Jobs saying they are going to make FaceTime an open standard seems to imply that they are adding something of their own to the mix.

What have all the other video-calling capable phones been using thus far? Is there no existing standard?

There was a slide pointing out that it was based on existing technologies already.

like the MiniDisplayPort.

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