Thanks Naveed for bringing ooVoo to my attention. ooVoo is a great service for video conferencing and voice calls.

ooVoo is in beta right now and offers free voice calls to landlines in USA and Canada. So, for all you road warriors, a nice utility to have for video conferencing and voice calls. You can have up to six people in a video conferencing session and the quality is excellent over most broadband connections.

Contacts can be imported from most applications like Outlook, Gamil, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo mail, etc.

You can also record video conferencing sessions, a great idea for training and record keeping. Try it yourself at http://www.oovoo.com.

An interesting feature about video conferencing with ooVoo is the ability to have video effects, so you can grow a virtual mustache or glasses!

I know I’ve talked about video over IP, a new service based on this technology is in beta right now. Started by Comcast, this service allow users to view TV shows, movies and other content. So if you’ve missed a show or an episode of a show on cable, watch it on your computer by visiting http://www.fancast.com. Such service has been touted by many companies but this is the first time a major cable provider is getting into this business. It would prove once and for all if such a service drops cable viewer rates or creates a whole new target audience.

I’ll be working on testing Fancast over Tversity, if someone has already had success, drop me a note.

After Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) the natural next step is Video over Internet Protocol. Video over Internet Protocol is not that big of a problem; unless you want to light up 20 thousand houses in a community then you need a huge internet pipe, but the problem with video streaming poses some challenges when pushed over a Wi-Fi connection.

The bottom line is, just as voice has requirements of pushing a lot of packets in sequence, video has the same requirement but at a larger scale and there are more packets and bigger packets. For a single dwelling, I’ve tested 1080i HD video streaming over 802.11g with success, but for a similar solution for an entire community over WiMAX, I’m not sure how well that will work.

AT&T’s U-Verse service broadcasts video over IP but there is no wireless component. I don’t know of anyone who is happily using the U-Verse service, but if you are, please chime in and give us an update.

Here is an article of interest from FAQ’s section on Wimax.com about hi definition video over WiMAX

I’ve been using voice over IP for a while and it works great, but what about video over IP?

Although relatively new, I’ve been using video over IP for over a year now. I’m basically using it for entertainment, streaming media over IP via an 802.11g connection to my entertainment system.

I’ve tried several streaming applications to achieve this, by far, the best is Tversity. I run this on a Windows XP box and I have couple of media boxes, DSM-320 and DSM-520 that display video on a big screen TV.

I’ve also heard from some people that a voice conversation does not work very well over WiFi, I say, if live video can work over WiFi then voice is no problem. If it’s not working on your network, look at some other trouble spots.