Video Chat Adds New Dimension to Holiday

Tonight is the first night of Passover, a night when our family assembles to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt, replete with the story of the 10 plagues. As the kids get older and more geographically dispersed, it's been harder to physically round them up for this holiday. This year I decided we'd broadcast to them using live video.

For the last few days, in my spare time, I've been toying around with exactly the best way to make that happen. With only a few hours left to go, I'm not quite there yet. And now, my son says he knows what the 11^th plague is—a mother intent on video-casting the Passover Seder.

The Problem: Three of the kids—one in Argentina, one in Portland, and one in San Francisco—all need to be part of the holiday from afar. Only one has a webcam. One can't download anything new onto her PC since she's living with a guest family and it's their computer. One has an ancient IBM notebook PC. One is a MacBook user. The idea is to broadcast a single video from me and invite them all to view it in real time. Most of the IM services handle video, but you can have a video chat with only one person at a time; you can't broadcast out to multiple viewers.

First Try: iChat on the Macintosh. Apple's documentation says you can use an AOL IM account or .mac account with iChat, but the details are pretty sketchy. The only people I seem to be able to use iChat video with reliably are other .mac users. I can easily add AIM users as buddies, but only for text and audio IM. So, despite the fact that my MacBook has a great built-in camera (iSight), only one of my three subjects had iChat, and he didn't have a .mac account. I sent him an invite to video chat; he saw my invitation, but couldn't initiate a response. The connection would time out, even when I tried things like lowering the bandwidth.

The other two kids, both AIM users, weren't able to join my video chat invitation either, even though they have AIM Pro's video instant messaging capabilities. Back to the drawing board.

As a recent Apple user, I'm evermore convinced that when things work they work beautifully, but when things don't work with Apple you are quite lost. iChat is great to use for a video chat between two high speed, well endowed Macs. (Apple's literature suggests that to use the video you must be running at least a dual-1GHz G4 or a G5, connected to the Internet by at least a 384Kbps connection. In order to host a multi-person video chat you'll need at least a 100Kbps connection.)

Second Try: Skype. I'm a long time Skype voice user, but had never used the video capabilities. Once I determined that iChat wasn't going to be able to handle my requirements, I tried Skype for Mac 2.5 with the Mac's built-in camera, and Skype on Windows, using an ancient Logitech QuickCam Pro. Both versions worked beautifully and with relative ease. You simply dial the person you want to Skype (they need to have a Skype account) and have your webcam turned on.

Luckily, the Argentineans are big Skype users too, so we didn't need to install anything new or extra on their PC. And both of the other kids downloaded Skype and were quickly enjoying watching us live on video, too.

The Logitech camera, which looks like a big golf ball on a pedestal, is motorized and pans around the room when I use the accompanying Logitech software, so it's easy to broadcast a moving panorama.

The last major hurdle? I can only video chat with one person at a time. We are working serially; I can't broadcast to all of them at once. (Often called point-to-multipoint broadcasting.) Skype doesn't support multiple users. So I can go round-robin fashion from one user to another, keeping the others on hold. Not an ideal way to spend an evening, is it?

Third Try: Festoon. According to reports, Festoon (still in beta) will handle a video chat with multiple users. It works as a Skype add-on. Too bad the system appeared to be down when we tried to download the program.

It's been three days since I started hounding the kids to get ready for our first live broadcast of a Passover Seder. After three days of being guinea pigs they're asking for me to just send the DVD! I should be cooking, shopping, and cleaning, but I've been struggling with video chatting instead. With a few hours left to go and dinner to prepare, I've decided that for this year it's going to be a serial video chatting holiday. Each participant will join us for 20 minutes and then it's on to the next. That's about as much of a plague as I can handle right now.

Next up? It seems that video chat services like 1VideocConference and Paltalk will do the trick. Both require that you download a video client and both, I think, would make it all too easy for the kids to visit one of the other channels on these services and wind up in an adult video chat room.

Love to hear from anyone who's managed a family video chat with more aplomb.