Skype’s new state of the art speech codec SILK will be made available to third party licensees for free, the company is announcing later today. Skype GM Jonathan Christensen will be speaking about the new program at the eComm event in San Francisco later today.
SILK has been highly regarded by the guys that follow this sort of thing and is included in the most recent version of Skype for Windows (the Mac version with SILK will be coming in April). If both sides of the call have a version of Skype that includes the new codec, the call quality increases dramatically.
Skype is now making the codec available for third party use on a royalty free basis. There are a number of speech codecs available on the market today, including iSac and AMRWideband, and an open source codec called Speex. Skype claims that SILK outperforms all of these.
So why give it away to competitors? Christensen says its about setting standards in the industry so that VoIP services can spread more quickly, particularly to hardware devices that today are not optimized for voice over the Internet.
It’s also a sign that Skype, with 400 million or so worldwide registered users, isn’t particularly concerned about the competition any more. They’re handing over a key piece of intellectual property to competitors that can reduce their costs and possibly improve voice quality. They wouldn’t do that unless they felt their pole position was fairly permanent for now.
More importantly, it signals that Skype may be preparing to open up their service in the future. Skype has long been derided for being a closed service (by people like me, who continue, however, to use it daily). Their API allows developers to access limited features of the service, but a call requires the opening of the Skype client. If Skype were to open its core calling functions as a service, the number of applications that would build it in would explode. Skype would benefit from a surge in paid calls to traditional and mobile phones (Skype Out). Our guess is that the debate to open these core functions through the API is still raging within Skype, but that the proponents of openness are slowly starting to turn the tide.
Skype has come out v4 for Windows and based on its preliminary review, I have found it quite good.
Skype rocks.
It is one of the major benefactors of startups in India, allow them to communicate both with each other as well as with their partners and clients overseas at minimal or no cost. The technology and startup community in India would not be where it is today without skype.
Thank you skype!
From India
Anjali Sen
The reason why I’m always using Skype.
TechFilipino
Yep, Skype is one of the greatest application today.
I wish they would be a standalone company or owned by a company closer to their core business (e.g., Google or Yahoo!).
I think that skype could revolutionize [business] collaboration if they wanted too. If they add video multi-cast, desktop sharing, and couple other collaborations tools, they can totally disrupted the WebEx market.
Yup! I use Skype and GoToMeeting on a regular basis. I have Skype-In with Net-gear WiFi and NO wall phone.
Also I don’t understand people that buy Vonage service. $25/month?
@Jeremy Chone: yes, and whiteboarding functionality too. Dabbleboard would be a great fit there. Btw they’re already doing desktop sharing on the Mac beta, and soon on Windows.
This is great. I would love to use it my product, Where can I get the codec and how to formalize the procedure of using it in the product?
SG
email SILKSupport@skype.net with subject “SILK Binary SDK Request”
Skype Journal on this subject: http://skypejou...erwideband.html
Skype and VoIP have fallen out of the news, lately. Nevertheless, we’ve updated the software platforms to support VoIP at http://sw.tearn...arch/label/VoIP
It’ll be interesting to watch the Twitter chatter for each platform.
For landline communication, there is no other way in my mind.
gifoftheday.blogspot.com
Yes… linux ftw >_<
wonder if they’ll ever make these new codecs available as firmware updates to the Belkin and Linksys WiFi skype phones…
Or the Netgear WiFi phone?
EEI recently announced its nationwide search for a CTO. Starting from the top, EEI has contacted Aber Whitcomb, current MySpace CTO, as well as Sean Parker, Founder of Napster and Former President of FaceBook. “No offers have been agreed upon yet so the search continues”, says EEI CEO RJ Garbowicz.
@Jeremy
I agree 100% about the opportunity for Skype. They are in the process of waking up and smelling the coffee. Recently, they posted jobs for Product Mgnt & Biz Dev with a focus on SMB and Business applications.
Ahh, just reading the article blurb I knew it was a M.A. article… (nothing against the other great writers here).
I think what everyone is after is Video communication, the voice thing is very 1999.
If they open up their video conferencing platform that would be really cool.
CEO RJ Garbowicz was asked what is YourNight.com, he responded, “Picture this; you get home from work in the evenings and you turn on your PC, what do you do . . . answer email . . . browse your social networking or dating site . . . play online games . . . search videos and music . . . shop online . . . peruse job listings . . . check out local events . . . search for a business . . . go to your online banking . . . well you get the point, YourNight.com affords you all of this, and much, much more – all within one colossal, user-friendly portal . . . that’s all I can say for now, since we are still in stealth mode . . . however, as soon as we complete our Series A capital raise of $10 million our purpose and presence will be known.”
The key is if the hardware manufacturers (IP phones, WiFi phones, etc.) adopt SILK, but also the SIP trunking service providers. You need end-to-end wideband telephone or it’s useless.
Wrote about it here:
http://blog.tmc...lly-arrived.asp
This is a pretty big deal, IF, as Tom says – IP phone companies and SIP termination providers start to support it. Without the backbone, calls made will never be HD.
@William – H.264 has pretty much established itself as the video codec of choice, I think we will see Skype and others move towards this. When you disrupt an audio stream you get a broken conversation, but that isn’t the case for video – you just wait for a frame or two and you’re back at it, disruptions aren’t noticed.
Great to see you blogging again Michael! Welcome back!
I use skype every day for super cheap SMS service, calling relatives in europe from the U.S. unlimited minutes for $9.99/month, video chat and more. I freaking love it, the quality is phone+ and it just works!
@Alex, good to hear!
I love Skype. I don’t know why I don’t use it more often.
Skype is an awesome service with a pathetic customer service. I hope this SILK thing would do good.
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