I recently came across a nice blog post from John McArthur, a venture capitalist, mentioning how he uses Skype to speak to people at startups for free or cheap. Technology has developed quite a bit since John attended the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Back then AT&T debuted its Picturephone, which allowed video calls over standard phonelines way before computers were commonplace. I wanted to find out a bit more about the Picturephone and see how different it could possibly be from High Quality Video on Skype. How different are they? Wow. Read on to see what I found.

Bell Labs revealed the first Picturephone prototype in 1956. It could transmit a small black and white image once every two seconds. In 1964 AT&T debuted the Picturephone, giving a demonstration that linked visitors at the World’s Fair in New York with visitors at Disneyland in California. Users who tried out the Picturephone said the controls were difficult to use and the picture was too small, so AT&T revamped the product and released it to the public (in New York, Chicago, Washington DC and Pittsburgh) in 1970.

There were a few problems with the Picurephone as it was released. First, in each local exchange it needed three pairs of wires (2 for the video and one for the audio) to complete a call, rather than the one needed for normal calls. And over long distances, single wires made multiple calls, so there often wasn’t enough bandwidth for the Picturephone except for specific city-to-city links (Bell Labs was still working out how to compress the video). Thus the Picturephone would generally only work in local areas, where it was easy to walk, bike or drive to see the person you wanted to speak to.

The second problem was the price—it was very high. I found conflicting information on how much the service actually cost in 1970 (this page says $125 per month [$699.61 in 2007 dollars] plus $21 per minute [$177.53]), here it’s $86.50 per month [$484.13] and included 30 free minutes, and here says a 3 minute call between New York and Washington DC cost $16 [$89.55] and a 3 minute call from New York to Chicago cost $27 [$151.11]), but in any case it was exorbitant. And it made little sense to spend so much money when there were so few people to make Picturephone calls to.

Fast forward 38 years—now after you buy a webcam, making High Quality Video calls on Skype is totally free to any of Skype’s 276 million registered users. The very first Picturephone prototype could transmit one small black and white frame every two seconds; High Quality Video can do up to 30 frames per second in color at a 640x480, which looks great on a full screen.

How nice is it that our history of super expensive, low quality video has been rewritten by High Quality Video on Skype? I think it’s pretty nice.