Price is right for video chat groups

Dick Tracy, here we come.

Video phoning is not yet on a wrist radio, but it is close - you can easily get it to work as a two-way feature on a wireless handheld computer, for example.

What was once limited to technophiles with lots of cash is now available to anyone with a reasonably new computer and an internet connection - and often for free, especially on a PC or laptop.

Text-based chat groups started featuring interactive video years ago, but it has now developed to the point where even mainstream Yahoo! offers a video component with its Yahoo! chat - and many web cameras come with software that will let users conduct full voice and video broadcast exchanges with selected friends on special web pages - a simulcast is a conversation.

Intel's "PC cameras", for example, do just that through a third party software agent called iVista (from INetCam) that charges a one-off US$50 ($113) for the ability to stream voice and video at will.

But you do not want to pay, right?

PalTalk, discussed in the main report, has a streaming video feature that lets users add images at a slow refresh rate to voice chat or personal calls. Once your web camera is activated (yes, you need one), PalTalk hosts the images on its website: for a "small subscription", you can increase the refresh rate, making the video very nearly stream, even on a dialup connection.

The danger of putting streaming video on your own website, for those of you who have them, is that many website hosts charge for data transfers over a certain amount - and streaming video, especially if you have many friends, eats bandwidth up like no other application on the internet.

Yahoo's webcam chat feature is also easy to set up and maintain - it's free, as well, and under 8Mb (messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/webcams.html).

Other free video/audio chat tools:

Eyeball LE, a 2.3Mb download

im4cam, 4.2Mb

Phone Free, 1.5Mb

Intel

INetCam