Multi-person video chat?

October 25, 2008 7:27 AM

Is there an affordable way to set up a videoconference among the five households in my family, which are scattered through the U.S. and Europe? I understand that Skype and IM services support one-to-one conferences, but I'm not sure about multipoint. Oovoo looks good, but I understand it's prone to abuse. What's my best option?
posted by futility closet to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: From a quick Google it doesn't look like there's any problem with installing and using ooVoo as videoconferencing software, just that it allows people to make prank calls. In any case, I've used it several times before and it does what it says on the tin.
posted by katrielalex at 7:45 AM on October 25, 2008

Skype does video conference calling, as does iChat. In Skype, go to Call > Start Conference Call.
posted by Happy Dave at 8:19 AM on October 25, 2008

You could probably do something private inexpensively on Paltalk. Their various membership levels are better explained here.
posted by JaredSeth at 8:41 AM on October 25, 2008

Oh I should mention, in case there are children in those households, that Paltalk does have some seriously adult areas but supports parental controls.
posted by JaredSeth at 8:50 AM on October 25, 2008

iChat on the Mac does up to 4-person video chat at a time.
posted by nitsuj at 9:06 AM on October 25, 2008

We use mebeam.com to do this every thursday on a private channel. All it needs is the flash plugin and it's 100% free. The weakest link is the audio, so for that we use Ventrilo on a private server, works awesome.
posted by jedrek at 9:31 AM on October 25, 2008

Skype only does 1-on-1 video calls. You can do a multi-person audio call though.
posted by zippy at 9:52 AM on October 25, 2008

Stickam lets you put a bunch of people's cams up at once.
posted by jjb at 3:52 PM on October 25, 2008

Response by poster: (In the end we went with Oovoo. It works fine, but note that six-point calls are free only for a trial month. After that the free service supports only three-way calls.)
posted by futility closet at 6:04 AM on December 26, 2008