Blind Research Study Indicates ooVoo Way Ahead of Skype

A third party research firm conducted a study in order to get users' opinion of Skype, and high quality video service, ooVoo (News - Alert), in comparable conditions.

The study was conducted on December 10, 2009 and January 18-22, 2010, throughout 13 separate sessions, with the survey participants located in New York and a facilitator located in Berkeley, California.

ooVoo, a high quality video communication service with 13 million registered users and growth of more than 600,000 new users monthly in 2010, announced the results of the blind study conducted by a third party research firm to demonstrate how its product stacked up against category leader Skype (News - Alert).

According to the results, ooVoo was preferred over Skype, and users cited superior sound and video quality, delivered anytime and anywhere, as some of the reasons as to why they favored ooVoo over Skype.

“The research results confirm what users have been telling us about ooVoo quality vs. Skype,” Philippe Schwartz (News - Alert), CEO, ooVoo, said, adding that they had built and innovative and scalable technology and infrastructure that was optimized for the users.

 Based on consumer feedback, ooVoo users enjoyed more consistency than what Skype and other video chat companies are offering.”

In addition to quality, a number of factors contribute to users’ overall preference of ooVoo over Skype. While Skype offered a 5-way chat feature, ooVoo offered a 6-way multi-point feature. Moreover, the 5-way feature offered by Skype was still being beta tested and appeared to have many bugs.

Since ooVoo hosted its video chat on dedicated servers, the quality was pretty consistent, whereas Skype's technology relied on individual processors and hence quality was less reliable especially where there was uncertain bandwidth.

“We led the video chat industry for three years with high-quality multi-point, while it took three years for Skype to catch up,” said Schwartz, adding that ooVoo's core technology and infrastructure gave it a solid foundation from which it could experiment fearlessly.

During the blind study, only the video windows of both Skype and ooVoo were exposed side-by-side in comparable sizes as to avoid any recognition on the part of the Skype user.

According to the findings of the study, it appeared that 68 percent of Skype users preferred ooVoo's sound quality and video chat conversational quality over those of Skype. The study also indicated that 80 percent of Skype users preferred ooVoo's telephone sound quality and roughly the same percentage seemed to prefer ooVoo's telephone conversational quality over Skype conversational quality. In the end analysis, 84 percent users preferred ooVoo to Skype.

ooVoo provides high quality video communication services to anyone with a PC or Mac, broadband connection and a web camera. ooVoo’s technology enables businesses and consumers to experience high-quality, real-time video calls with up to six users anytime and anywhere in the world.