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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree with you, but you couldn't have have meaningful live videochat between continents in 2000.

CU-SeeMe worked pretty well in 1995 if you had access to a half decent Internet connection, which admittedly most people didn’t.

For well funded organisations, ISDN video conferencing facilities were reasonably common.

Verizon in NYC was trying to make ISDN happen in the home in the mid 90's. I had it. The hard part was getting an ISP that supported SLIP.

In Australia ISDN was available pretty much everywhere to any residential customer who wanted to pay for it, but it was not particularly popular. It was widely used by businesses, however.

The main reason was that the line rental was significantly higher, POTS lines had untimed flat rate local calls, whereas ISDN didn’t, and ISPs charged more for ISDN plans.

Towards the end of the 90s that changed for voice calls, and so a fair number of folks who couldn’t get ADSL for one reason or another got DoV (Data over Voice) Internet services. This is where you make a single channel ISDN “voice” call, and then use it for 64Kbps data. Most ISPs supported it on ordinary dialup plans.

This gave you significantly better speed, and much improved latency compared with what could realistically be achieved with V.90.

My favorite part was due to it being a digital line there was no modem negotiation.

CuSeeMe certainly was being used before 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

That took until skype in 2003 I guess. The idea is pretty old though and people were trying for it for a while from different angles.

Maybe not between continents but we had meaningful live video chat in 1968

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