Speaking at the NXTcomm Trade Show in Chicago on Tuesday, AT&T’s New CEO and Chairman, Randall Stephenson, introduced what he claims is the first service allowing callers to share live video during a phone call. It’s the first AT&T service to be delivered on the company’s new IMS platform.
The service will be called Video Share. For $0.35 a minute, AT&T subscribers with access to the company’s 3G wireless network can talk on speaker phone while simultaneously streaming a video their phone is capturing in real time.
Video Share enables one-way, live streaming video feeds, which can be seen by both users while they are participating in a two-way voice conversation. Once users have initiated a Video Share call, either party can be the one generating the video stream for the other to see.
AT&T research has shown strong customer 
interest in Video Share for a range of uses, including:
- Sharing. Consumers can share moments with family and friends as the moments happen.
- Providing a Sense of “Being There.” Consumers or business contacts can be in one place while seeing and hearing what is happening in another.
- Getting/Giving Advice. Consumers or business contacts can seek advice or quick decisions by sharing a video and audio of a given scenario.
Video Share is being rolled out in three markets on a trial basis, Atlanta, Dallas and San Antonio, and will likely spread to 200 additional markets in late July if the trial run is successful. Video Share won’t be available for the iPhone, which AT&T Wireless has exclusive wireless rights to offer service for, because it uses the older [EDGE] network.
In addition to paying per minute, customers can order 25 minutes of Video Share for $4.99, or 60 minutes for $9.99. According to Stephenson, consumers “should expect this to quickly reach the other two screens, and that’s the PC and the television.”
The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), is an architectural framework, originally designed by the wireless standards body 3GPP, for delivering IP multimedia services to end users. It enables media created on one platform (phones for example), to be distributed to televisions or computer screens.
