The End of Skype

Longtime video chat app Skype will be disconnected today. Fox News Radio's Eben Brown joins us to discuss the app's fall from grace. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well before you got stuck on a teams or zoom meeting,
there was Skype. And today marks the end of the era.
Evan Brown with Fox News Radio This morning.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Good morning, and the same to you. Yeah, so yeah,
this is this is it for Skype. Remember your first
Skype call? Do you remember that? That was? It kind
of wowed everyone the first time they did it, The
idea that you could use the computer you already had
to make a video call for free, and so it

(00:33):
sort of changed things. It changed the dynamic. It first
debuted in two thousand and three. People started using it
maybe a couple of years after it started off in Europe,
and then Microsoft bought the thing for eight and a
half billion dollars in twenty eleven, just as everyone was
buying smartphones and beginning to use the native video chatting

(00:54):
capabilities on a smartphone that would come around. So Skype
sort of really fell off, by the way, Waide after that,
And you would have thought that the pandemic might have
been the perfect opportunity for it to have a resurgence,
but it didn't happen because the technology itself really didn't
get any better. It still had a lot of breakups

(01:16):
and dropouts and you know, scattery video and things like that,
and some other technology having to do with video conferencing
as opposed to direct calls became more popular, and that
namely was Zoom. And prior to the pandemic, most people
didn't know what a zoom was. It had been around
for a bit, but it had just been for corporations

(01:37):
to do their corporate video conferencing, and it mutated into
a you know, a personal, you know, non business, one
on one type of thing for a lot of people.
Microsoft which had owned Skype at this point, said well,
we better developed something like that. So they came up
with Microsoft Teams and so as of today, if you
still have a Skype account, Microsoft is poorting it over

(01:58):
to Microsoft Teams. That was so, yeah, your stuff will
be still, by and large be there, but it'll be
through Microsoft Teams as opposed to Skype.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Wow, it's gone the way of the phone booth that
I remember. Phone booths publish, yes, telephones Skype is Will
there be a ceremony? Is there any sort of Will
they just be sitting at a bar or scratching their
a little salute?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, probably a little salute, But that's that's going to
be it. Most people had probably already forgotten about Skype
because you know, no one really uses it, which is
why it's being shut down. It's an expensive thing to
maintain if no one's going to use it, right, So,
but Microsoft Teams is there, but Zoom is there there.
You know, people have the native video chat apps on

(02:48):
their smartphones, whether it's from Google or it's Apples FaceTime.
So the the ability, the idea of video chatting has
become quite ubiquitous. There was a time where it was
only the stuff of Star Trek, but now anyone, you know,
practically anyone has access to video chatting at some point,
and even even mobiley. So so here we are, and

(03:10):
we're you know, part of the reason we are is
because Skype became a thing for a while.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Who knew. Evan Brown, Fox News Radio, thank you so
much for your time this morning.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
You're welcome.