Skype TX | Hacker News Reader

Skype TX

media.skype.com

115 pointsjaboutboul52 comments

They should fix their core business. I loathe skype. Instant messaging on multiple devices is just dreadful as you get all conversations as unread again on any device you log on to skype. The mobile client sucks your battery dry and is super slow...i hate it with passion... Still i need to use it as most of my clients do..

Working on it. Thanks for your feedback.

(Disclaimer: Skype Engineer)

Neat! Then perhaps you can provide some insight into why Skype ditched peer-to-peer in favour of centralisation?

There was a pretty good writeup on that. Short answer: Mobile devices.

Here it is: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2013/06/sort/time_...

Intelligence Agencies also prefer Skype that way :D

For what it's worth...the read/unread sync state has been fixed recently in the last few months. With that also came the ability to IM someone who is offline and have them be able to read the IM even if when they come back online, you're offline (wow!! what sort of black magic is that??)

Is that a good feature though? It just means that microsoft is intercepting your messages and storing them (you also can't tell when someone hasn't received your message anymore.)

They still were intercepting it anyway. But I completely join the train that Skype is a virus needing to be killed.

I have read about that but it doesn't seem to work for me ? I still get dozens of old conversations as unread whenever i log onto skype on my phone.

I keep reading Skype Texas.

I read "skype transactions" and was awed that MSFT suddenly was a paypal competitor.

half.com OR, all over again.

Same here. Poor choice of letters to use for naming.

'Tx' is the standard abbreviation for 'transmission.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_%28telecommunicati...

Should have been 'Tx' then instead of 'TX' :)

I have a small side business providing consulting and equipment services to broadcasters using Skype/Google Hangouts/Spreecast/etc. as a cheap way to put remote interview subjects on the air. While this could be exciting depending on price, locking into Skype isn't ideal. In my experience letting the interview subject select the platform they're most comfortable with yields better results.

The best contribution from Skype is freeing the Silk codec which became part of Opus (luckily it happened before MS bought them). The rest is just a proliferation of closed and non federated communication networks and protocols.

They don't list any pricing, I wonder if they provide it for free with the caveat that you have to have a Skype logo and mentions.

Example, Oprah: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/06/0604_oprah_tech_effe...

>Video and audio are free from all notifications, signals, adverts or pop-ups.

I guess it depends on if you consider the Skype logo an advertisement.

HD-SDI output? They ain't kidding around.

That's...bog standard for studio use these days.

Inside a studio, absolutely. But when's the last time you saw anything remotely consumer facing with HD-SDI?

This is Skype we're talking about, not AJA.

So this is not my industry, but it's interesting to think about the requirements of a studio environment. I was recently handed a card by someone who did voiceover work, and he was "The ISDN guy" or something.

I assumed that ISDN died in like 1996, but it turns out it's still considered vital for some remote voice over work. http://www.alisocreek.net/vo-articles/ISDN-for-voice-over.ht...

People also use SourceConnect as a way to do studio-to-studio sessions. Works very well in the studio where I set it up. Sessions to Portland, Chicago, Germany, etc all go off without a hitch. http://source-elements.com/source-connect/

You can use an ISDN bridge service to be able to talk to those studios that are still on ISDN and that works well, as well.

So, this sounds like a decent thing to also have available as a service. That way clients can be on SourceConnect pure, ISDN over a bridge, or Skype TX.

Skype is used currently sometimes if the talent is local but the producers are remote. Allows them to "be in the room". But Skype TX sounds like a decent solution for collaborating between studios.

We're using ISDN for studio linkups in between radio stations, and for remote location -> studio connections. Would love to use Skype in it's place, major barrier is lack of fine-tuned control over gain, disabling AGC, etc. Video broadcast does seem to be the focus here, but Skype could be incredibly useful in radio broadcasting too.

I think the radio industry would definitely pay for an advanced software client, especially considering so many potential guests have Skype setup at home. Having control over guests gain and more detailed metering in the client would be brilliant.

Can you educate a know-nothing what 'gain' is in this context?

Well I'm likely using the wrong technical term, but it's the one most often used in my industry (in my experience). I'm referring to adjusting the original strength of the signal. That is, the signal level at the point it enters the audio mixer of the computer. I'd love to be able to control how that signal level is amplified, or at least make it easy for guests to manually.

I'm not great at explaining but if you search for 'gain in an audio context' I'm certain there'll be better explainers!

At first I thought it was a Chromebox for meetings [1] competitor. But they seem to have created a more enterprise product for broadcasts. I would imagine this is a very niche product.

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/solutions/for...

So, when is Skype RX coming ?

They're demoing this at NAB this week; it's a pretty stale show, filled with legacy tech, so this was one of the more interesting highlights (actual exchange with a sales engineer: "what kind of APIs do you have?" "what's an API?"). The text is definitely written for broadcast professionals.

> Using our technology, you’ll be able to interact with Skype callers across the globe – this includes experts, interviewees, audiences and even big-name stars.

Wow, it even works for big-name stars! Who writes this stuff, and who are they writing it for? It's just insulting.

They're writing it for people that aren't on Hacker News. The fact that the domain name is "media.skype.com" ought to give you a strong clue.

"People who aren't on Hacker News" also includes a lot of people who understand that the technical requirements to show a talking picture of a human does not vary by notoriety.

OK, I'll be even more specific, if it helps: it's a press release. It's designed for lowest common denominator reading, they have absolutely nothing to lose by writing in such a way that every single person is able to grasp the idea of what they're selling.

In this case 'Big name stars' is implying: "It's so simple and easy even people with no technical knowledge, and even those with minimal interest in making the effort to speak to you will be willing to use it". It isn't discussing the technical aspects, outside of usability.

It's also suggesting that it is useful for glossy, premium-quality interviews that would usually need dedicated kit and camera crew - not just in warzones, ad hoc news interviews and vox pops.

It's quite cleverly written for the target audience.

I also read it as: "audio and video are good enough to satisfy the agents / managers / PR people for the folks who get paid a lot of money to care about how their image and voice is presented to the public."

It's written to give suggestions/ideas of use cases, not to specify the technical limitations. A potential client reading this for the first time may not realize this product is applicable to their domain.

You're nitpicking uselessly.

I can't remember the name of the service used, but Barack Obama (a big name star) held a phone call using a service not too dissimilar from this one, and it crashed, big.

Overall, I think that the team was able to recover fairly well, but the news of the crash was fodder for political opponents for a while -- the irony (IIRC) being that he was hosting the conference call to discuss the status of HealthCare.gov with his supporters, and at the time, the stability of HealthCare.gov was somewhat farcical itself. Hosting that call on a conference call service that was also unstable was just too much for conservative media.

Saying that it works with "big name stars" is a pretty terse way of countering that objection to sale, and has to assuage the minds of actual big name stars likely to use it.

Interesting, this looks like it is intended to replace ISDN lines between studios for high quality calls.

I think it goes much further than that, I know that some live news organizations skype interviewees in.

HuffPo Live uses Google Hangouts -- but I can definitely see a need for a simple to use client.

They probably started development after the Skype fiasco at 30C3.

Link?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyA6NZ9C9pM

As a point of comparison, here's how the Free Software alternative looks:

https://media.libreplanet.org/u/zakkai/m/free-software-for-f...

Thanks!

Skype lacks a good API so that you can integrate it into your CRM, Customer support etc.

A usable and rich API is important, but using standards to achieve interoperability is probably just as important in my eyes. The fact that Skype isn't embracing WebRTC while stating that they want to enable all these use cases is far from ideal.

Lots of innovation is being done in the WebRTC API space: OpenTok (with a specific customer service API), Vline, AddLive, etc.

(full disclosure: i'm a developer evangelist for TokBox, creators of OpenTok)

As someone who listens to podcasts, this actually excites me a bit.

Whoa, the Skype TX! That's got like WAY four more cylinders than the standard Skype. Better Blue Book value too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com