Yesterday was the star-studded launch of Airtime, the social video chat service from Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the brains behind Napster.  This new partnership aims to revolutionize video chatting as it would allow people to share interest with friends or even with stranger – haven’t we seen this before?  Yeah, the newly launched service has been already compared with Chatroulette and Google+’s Hangouts.

To be fair, let’s look at Airtime on its own.

What is Airtime?

Airtime is an efficient, easy to use, browser-based video chat service between people via their existing Facebook accounts so users don’t need to download anything.  All you need is a Facebook account and a webcam and you’re good to go.  But because the service wants to give you an excellent video chat experience, it has a few system requirements like 1.5Ghz or faster, 512MB of RAM, and 1.5Mbps of bandwidth.

The video chat service allows users to share live experiences through content, and expand beyond their social graph to discover new people through similar interests in an environment that is collaborative, fun and safe.  Users can share videos from YouTube, which can be viewed simultaneously by chatters.

Fanning and Parker describe Airtime much like a bridge that connects people and eliminates the awkward silences on chats, especially if you’re talking to people you don’t actually know.

“We look at Airtime as if it were a smart and engaging host,” said Fanning. “Airtime is a service that does everything it can to help you find the people that you should know, and then guide your conversations further. These are connections that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. If you look at this from an idealistic standpoint, Airtime is something only technology can facilitate. And it is finally possible with the ubiquity of webcams, broadband connections and a highly developed identity layer. We’ve only scratched the surface with what the Internet can do today.”

Since Airtime is integrated to Facebook, users are notified via the social network when someone wants to chat on Airtime.

Airtime experience

When you login to Airtime via Facebook, you’ll be asked to approve access to your details, etc.  You’re then redirected to a welcome page with the live feed and your face plastered on the screen, and on the left side you can choose to talk to anyone in your Facebook friends list, people in your general area, or people with the same interests as you.  If you click on the trending topics streaming below, initiating a search for people who you may want to chat with while emitting a beeping sound.

Another platform for a peepshow?

With any service that offers video chatting, there will always be those people who find ways to taint the service, like doing sexual acts for the whole world to see.  So how is Airtime different from the rest of the video chat services?

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Parker explained that since Airtime is deeply integrated in Facebook, people can report abusive users.  Also, they assure users that they have a “very high-functioning abuse-prevention system that’s flagging this stuff.”  Fanning also stated that they have a face-detection system called OpenCV, which can help them deactivate accounts of exploitive users.

Is Airtime worth your time?

Though it may seem like Airtime could be the next big thing in video chatting, the features aren’t new.  People have seen what they’re offering from Chatroulette, which lets users jump into random chats or sharing videos, just like Google+ Hangouts.  The only positive thing about Airtime is that it rolls various products into one and that’s a plus for them, but is it enough to make people stay and use the service?

Here’s an excerpt from GigaOm that tackles the flaw of Airtime:

• There’s a system for awarding a fellow chat participant with stars. But there’s no limit to what you can give someone so it’s pretty meaningless.
• In addition to multiparty chats, I’d like to have the ability to share files during video chats and also record conversations as well. That could be useful for conducting video interviews that I can integrate into blog posts.
• I’d also like the ability to zoom in on a particular location besides my own or search for someone to talk to about one specific topic. That would be cool for larger events or to get a man-on-the-ground report from some big event. Right now, there is a ticker that runs along the chat window showing some recent trending interests so you can chat with someone about that particular topic. But you can’t pick out your own topic.
• I did have some problems connecting with a couple of friends, who were on Facebook but somehow couldn’t receive my calls.
• While watching shared video, there doesn’t seem to be a way to adjust your own voice separately from the video’s sound levels. I found myself shouting a little to be heard over noisy parts in the video.

Airtime is still in its early stage and there’s so much room for improvement.  Let’s just see what Sean&Shawn do with the early feedback they’re getting, and their goals for rolling out what upcoming features are in the pipeline.