Airtime was launched on Tuesday by the founders of Napster – Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. This Chatroulette-inspired random video chat service seems to have piqued the curiosity of even Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The event was filled with celebrities, but with so much fanfare, 2 years of work, and $40M of investment, the actual Airtime video demo was a disaster. The video calls failed so badly that comedian and star of show “Community”, Joel McHale, asked who needs to be fired.
Airtime chose Flash for their video calling service. For folks with Flash experience, their call failures was not surprising.
Device dependence
Flash video requires some form of acceleration from your graphics card, hence, the experience varies for everyone. Let’s not forget that many mobile devices are unable to render Flash, such as the iPad, iPhone and PDAs.
Reliability & Security
Do you really want someone to be listening in to your conversations online and watching how you behave? Well, the thing about Flash video is that it has to go through a server, which exposes the content of the entire conversation to the service provider. In fact, Airplay “captures screen images during conversations and relies on a team of moderators located overseas to keep tabs on any inappropriate exchanges.”
Read our VSee vs. Flash article here .
Related Articles
- Napster Founders Unveil a Video Chat Service (New York Times)
- If you’re trying out Airtime today, you might run into Mark Zuckerberg (The Next Web)
- Adobe Flash: Hardware Acceleration, GPU, Drivers, And Details (Tom’s Hardware)
- Flash Player 10.1 hardware acceleration for video and graphics (Adobe)
