Oprah's Extreme Skype Adventure
Internet Video-Phone Gets Star Treatment from Winfrey
Skype enables users to make telephone calls over the Internet using a computer. Web cam-equipped computers offer the added bonus of allowing callers to see as well as speak to the person(s) on the other end of the line. The service is free when both parties to a call are registered subscribers, and costs a nominal amount when only one party subscribes.
Oprah Skypes the World
On Thursday’s show, Oprah Winfrey used the Jetsons-style Skype video to check in with viewers across the globe. Guests Skyped in from Grise Fiord, Nunavut (Canada’s northernmost community, just south of the North Pole) to Palmer Station, Antartica (just north of the South Pole); and from a jet flying at an altitude of 37,000 feet to a submarine cruising at 60 feet below sea level.
Skype cameras were set up at a Best Buy outlet in New York City, at Harrod’s department store in London, England, and outside Oprah’s Harpo Studios in Chicago. Though usually overrun with tourists, Oprah’s headquarters was, to the host 's and viewers’ amusement, a wasteland when the camera feeds first began. Best Buy was similarly deserted. Same with Harrod’s. The crowds gathered soon enough.
“Where the Skype are you?” Oprah asked repeatedly of invited guests and passersby.
Highlights of the Show
The program offered many lighthearted moments between Oprah and often unsuspecting shoppers. It included interviews with Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al Fayed and a visibly delighted Skype CEO, Josh Silverman. It also demonstrated interesting and unusual uses of the video-phoning application, including a:
- Boy taking flute lessons from a teacher 6,000 miles away
- Woman "attending" her sister's wedding on another continent
- Hypnotherapy session with the therapist and client in separate locations
- Long-distance wine-tasting
- Blind man who skis, sails and rides a bicycle using a camera-equipped helmet and a friend navigating on Skype.
Canadian content on the Oprah show included not only the Town Administrator of Grise Fiord, Janice Anderson, but also Toronto "Skype-sketch artist" Barbara Muir, who crafted an image of the TV host over the course of the hour-long program. Muir will likely soon have to take her Skype "off the hook," such is the flood of attention that a brief appearance on the highly rated talk show can generate.
No Skype for Canada's iPhone
Skype has made headlines in Canada recently for being excluded from the on-board applications released with the new iPhone. It has joined the long list of other Internet-based applications -- like online TV smorgasbord Hulu – which are not available in Canada.
Skype is available for non-iPhone use in Canada for a monthly cost of $2.95, which gives users unlimited calls in the US and Canada.
Skype Recalls The Jetsons
Oprah cited the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons as a show that shaped her idea of what the future might hold, and provided the first glimpse or the technology that makes Skype's services possible.
While many of the projections of that futuristic cartoon series remain firmly in the future -- no jet-backpacks just yet -- Skype, or what the Jetsons called the "tele-viewer," has indeed come into existence, whether prophetically or prescriptively.
As for other technology for which now-adult viewers of The Jetsons are still waiting, the series was set in the year 2062, so time will yet tell just how predictive the show turns out to have been.
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