The New York Times has an article today that’s a re-hash of the video-conferencing-is-finally-happening genre. We’re talking video over the broadband-enabled Net, not mobile. And over broadband, the quality is pretty good actually.

Having said that, the evidence in the article seems to be entirely anecdotal, backed up by a couple of press releases by companies trying the flog conferencing kit. So much for hard news gathering.

Cheap video conferencing has been available for business usage for some time now, and most systems simply gather dust in remote meeting rooms. Video adds surprisingly little to most business conversations and it can actually detract from the interaction as people tend to feel self-conscious.

Having said that, the NYT does focus on two areas where video can enhance social transactions (and mentions the real killer app - P2P porn, in passing).

The first is grandparent/parent and child interactions. Where the adults are away, it enables them to maintain a relationship with young children far more effectively than just over a phone. And no one gets self-conscious talking to a kid either, so that’s one problem that flies away.

The good news for the industry is that these kids are (obviously) tomorrow’s video conferencing users and that it will be as natural to them as voice calls are to us. “Dad, was it true that people could only hear each other on the phone when you were a kid? And did they really eat animals? Yeuh!”

The other area is in social networking/dating, which is frequently a euphemism for porn, anyway. Despite its attempted family values and squeaky clean image, AOL’s early success was based largely on P2P chat porn, which you could argue directly drove the uptake of the Internet, too, in the mid-’90s. So, it’s probably going to be driving video conferencing - if it really does take off.

There is one interesting stat in the article, however. PalTalk, an online video messaging service, has enjoyed 30 million downloads of its free software to date. The basic service is free, which lets you see a still image of the other person, with an upgrade of $40 a year giving you video.

However, downloads are misleading. It’s actual users that are the real test and they claim that 3 million people use it at any one time.

Even if most of these users are, what a man quoted in the article calls, “people who show themselves,” that’s a lot of users.