This morning, New York City-based chat company Paltalk is releasing a version of its multi-person video chat service on the Web in beta. Called Paltalk Express, it is a Flash version of the company’s download client. While the front end is Flash/Flex, the back end is built on Paltalk’s proprietary technology, which allows up to thousands of people to participate in a video chat session at the same time. The company will be releasing embeddable widgets in the coming weeks, putting it in competition with Meebo, Tokbox, Userplane, and others.
When you launch Paltalk Express, you choose from any of several thousand “rooms” where chats are occurring. Each room can have just a handful of people, or more than 5,000. A chat the company hosted with William Shatner had 8,000 people in it. You can chat only via text, or if you have a Webcam set up, you can make your video stream available. A video camera icon indicates whether video is available for each participant. To see the video for a particular person, you select that person and drag them to a strip at the top of the screen. Anyone can add text chat, but to talk to everyone via video, you “raise your hand” and the moderator of the room hands you the “mic.”
Paltalk’s download client, which works only on PCs, already boasts 4 million active users a month (active being defined as someone who has logged on in the past 90 days), and hundreds of thousands of those pay an annual or monthly subscription fee ($60 a year or $15 a month). Only subscribers can see other people’s videos. Paltalk has a very active community, with 50,000 to 60,000 people online concurrently in 4,000 or 5,000 rooms at any given time. While this freemium model has worked well for the company so far, it remains to be seen whether people are willing to pay for video chat on the Web—even if it is massive multiperson video chat. If you don’t need to see hundreds of other people in your video chat, other completely free options exist, including Tokbox (for up to six people, and integrated into Meebo), Userplane, and SeeToo (for two people). Also, if you want to text chat with multiple other people while everyone is watching the same video or other piece of online content, there is Meebo Rooms, which has a similar feel to the Paltalk rooms.
Multi-person = Multi Headache
http://www.tech-exposed.com
I’ve never actually used any of these new style of Social networking sites. I’ll give it a shot, might be fun.
Good Luck…and hold (on) TIGHT! Your in for the ride of your life! Your updated version of your Anti-Virus/Firewall will cost you way less of a headache once you realize the value of this program! Fresh up front/Paying out the rear!
Erick, SeeToo supports now multiple participants.
I guess you got to ask… why the heck is Skype limited to ONLY one person per video chat when iChat has had this feature for years now and now flash players are offering the same. What’s the hold-up Skype?
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
sorry Jon…this is your BOSS…we don’t care what you do as long as you do it right…now should I ramble on a tad more? pfft!
With so many web cameras, there is a high possibility of extreme lag time.
pay to see webcams? sounds like p0rn to me…
PalTalk finally got into the web.. wow.. i never forgot about them. i have tried it and i must say it is exactly as good as the regular, non pro desktop app. i take my hat off.
a funny story you may not know Erick is that paltalk was at first a Skype-out (pc-phone) solution too. 10 years AGO in dial-up. they tested it and it was free. i talked 3hrs a day to the usa (it was anywhere to usa only) with it.
it makes my mind warp now to think that i used voip in dial-up back then and that it was as good as when skype came out.
and just a little nitpick Erick. this is Flex 3.0 all the way just like Yahoo Live.
Erick, you mixed and matched different products from different categories and compared apples to oranges to bananas: PalTalk, TokBox and Userplace, are video chat services – letting users with webcam to communicate. Meebo room is a chat service that let users share a video files that are hosted somewhere (like YouTube), the video does not originates from their webcams (see the difference?) SeeToo is a whole new concept that allows people share video files directly and immediately from their computers, so you don’t have to upload it to YouTube. Just categorizing all of the above under “video chat” is shallow, I expected from TC to be more insightful.
You have a major mistake!
All these sites mentioned, except for SeeToo, provide chat rooms with some capabilities of video conferencing, meaning watching each other on webcams.
SeeToo is the only site that privedes the ability to select a video file, unlimited in size or type, from your hard-drive and watch it TOGETHER with many friends, WITHOUT the need to upload it for many hours.
The interactions surrounding the synchronized video watching can be done by chat, VoIP or phone…
This could bring in enormous social,privacy and child porn issues to web unless restricted.
also noteworthy is that meebo does not integrate viewing webcams in rooms. they only integrate tokbox (and other apps) within IM windows.
Many of the competitors’ products I listed share various of the features you can find in Paltalk Express. There is no perfect apples-to-apples comparison.
I think what confused some readers is that I threw in Meebo Rooms there as well, which is different than Meebo’s chat client, but similar to the room metaphor you see in Paltalk Express. I’ve updated the post and moved the mention of Meebo Rooms down to the bottom. Hope that clears things up, and thanks for the catch.
(These mix ups happen when you have 12 minutes to write a post).
Also, while Paltalk Express does not yet support the importing of YouTube videos,etc so everyone can chat about the content like Meebo Rooms, Paltalk’s download client does. And this functionality will be added soon to Paltalk Express.
So calm down, Bill and Alon.
Erick, if a moderator has to give you the “mic” that means is one person at a time video chat. How is this massive?
We being knowing about this since Feb 2008
here the post
http://www.loco...alk-t31140.html
i believe its a great Idea by paltalk although the few users on my site had said they would prefer a full client for mac and linux
Meebo is doing this integration for awhile and i think they got good reviews because of the flexibilty in app.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
The service has that many active members? Seems weird… it doesn’t seem that compelling, based on your profile of them. Maybe it’s all circling around porn?
http://www.yout...h?v=8LuKzNPEXc4
Check out the PalTalk offices and an interview I did with the CEO, Joel, for Pop17. Nice to see they are making their service available on apple computers. They have needed a flash upgrade.
I’m going to try embedding it:
hi
I wonder will it be possible to have anything of that kind input in russian analogue social networks?
http://www.flashcoms.com/
Maybe I’m missing something here, but what does Paltalk give you that uStream, Stickam, and Livevideo do not?
The one thing that Paltalk has that’s quite unique it’s what brings most of their paid subscribers… adult rooms.
80% of paying paltalk users are confined to adult chatrooms where anything goes. Trust me on this… i’ve seen some weird stuff in there for the couple of years where i was an active paltalk user.
If in addition to voice, video and text chat you need to collaborate, share screens, whiteboard and share docs with no download required for attendees, give Dimdim a try. It’s free for up to 20 people at a time – or you can download and run your own free, opensource unlimited Dimdim server (as a simple VMWare appliance) at http://www.dimdim.com
ciao
i need your phone at your offee