Skype Unveils New Software, Partnership With Dailymotion

Skype and Dailymotion, an online video commuity, have created a partnership to coincide with the release of Skype 3.5 for Windows, which was released to the public today. This new version adds videos from the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Metacafe to Skype and will establish an exclusive Dailymotion channel on Skype. This will allow Skype users to share videos from Dailymotion’s Mood Channels.

"With this partnership, two of the largest online global communities have come together to create a new experience in video sharing," stated DailyMotion CEO and cofounder Benjamin Bejbaum. "From now on, Skype users will have access to more than 3 million videos, including premium content and exclusive artwork from our MotionMakers. Skype users will discover that creativity is one of our core values."

With the new feature, Skype users will be able to integrate video into text chats and also download videos to add them to a user's "mood". According to Skype, user moods are "a way of sharing your feelings with friends and family and are becoming increasingly popular in the Skype community because they are a simple, more personalized way to share all sorts of things with other Skype contacts."

To ensure a higher rate of acceptance to its users in various countries around the world, Skype will be localizing each of its Mood Channels to its key markets. The videos on the Mood Channels are top-ranked submissions from Dailymotion’s MotionMaker program.

Erick Hachenburg, chief executive of Metacafe, believes that "video mood messages provide members of the vibrant Skype community a great way to express themselves by tapping into the original and entertaining videos available on Metacafe, including those in our Producer Rewards program that pays video creators for their best work."

I am not sure that this will make Skype any more useful, but I agree that it will definitely make it more fun. It will be interesting to see how Skype's 200 million+ customers use the videos.

Don't expect this to be the only new feature in Skype version 3.5 though. Other features include the ability to capture a still image from a Skype video chat, the automatic redial features that automatically redials a number every two minutes until it is answered, and the ability to transfer incoming calls to another person on Skype.