Viewplicity is a Flash-based group video collaboration service with customizable components for both the novice website owner and the experienced web developer.  That’s what we say we offer, but what does that mean?  At the core, we are a video chat service.  What makes us stand out from the crowd?  Why use Viewplicity when you can use free services like Skype?

We asked Bob Nimon, our Chief Developer, to expain the differences between Viewplicity and Skype.  In the final of this two-part series, Bob gives us a peak into the camera features, plugins and simplicity of Viewplicity.

• Skype supports a single, active camera in a single two-party call.  Viewplicity was designed from the bottom up to support multiple cameras for applications that benefit from broadcasting multiple views of a subject or multiple subjects simultaneously. Viewplicity provides a novel, patent pending approach to managing the bandwidth of the various cameras to make it easy for users to handle. We can even record from all of the cameras on the users MAC or PC simultaneously.

• Skype provides little control over the user of the camera, the power that it consumes on your PC, and the bandwidth used. Viewplicity starts with automatically measuring your available bandwidth and then sets the use of it to a reasonable percentage of that amount. Viewplicity can be used in very low bandwidth situations by allowing the proper alignment with frame rate and quality with that bandwidth. If you have the bandwidth, you can have very nice 24-fps quality video. If you have very little and want to save most of it for audio we will drive it down to a small fraction of that. The user is allowed to take manual control and place the settings anywhere he wants. We provide both the senders and receivers a visual indication if the video is having network problems getting the camera streams through to the receiver.

• Skype can consume bandwidth from your computer even when you are not actively in a call to support other Skype users. Viewplicity does not use a peer-to-peer architecture and only needs one stream per active physical device. There is never any video/audio bandwidth consumed due to other users calls.

• Viewplicity’s focus is on ease of use, hence the “simplicity” aspect of its name. Easy for the web designer and easy for the web site users. Skype has a professional API that can be licensed to integrate into applications. With Viewplicity, there is no need to learn an API, or even be able to program at all. If you can copy and paste a few HTML tags, you are integrated – you can make video calls from your web site.

• We also have simple plugins for many popular frameworks (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress) to integrate with their user database where appropriate but their use in not required to “get connected” through your site.

• Viewplicity is based on Flash technology, which supports many communication protocols and uses this to automatically adapt to different user environments (firewalls, network routers, etc.) and can even work over straight HTTP (the basic web protocol) and can leverage the same SSL technology used in ecommerce. Skype uses its own proprietary protocol that can have problems in many network environments.

• Both products have certain security features at the network protocol level, but Viewplicity adds to that the additional safety of not traversing streams through other users computers and by having some added safety in the use of the private groups that require an “engraved invitation” to join. The streams associated with the groups are sent through dynamically allocated servers with identities that are not known ahead of time. The videos recorded in the groups are only accessible by the invited members of the group. Only the owner of the group can issue the necessary invitations. Invitations are only sent within the Viewplicity service, not through email or other non-secured communications. The Viewplicity invitations are sent through encrypted channels. The text messages sent between users ina group are also sent through these encrypted channels.

The shorter story, then is it is easier to use, much more full featured, and more secure. I actually like Skype and it has its uses. It would be one of the things I might pick if I wanted to place a single point to point call to someone I didn’t know, would be unlikely to talk to again, wanted to spend a very long time on the phone with, and didn’t care too much who listened in. Since its peer-to-peer, it would be very cheap for that type of use. Most of other cases – I would use Viewplicity.