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According to the company, Skype 4 will more tightly integrate all the existing features of the service, with an emphasis on making video calling a more accessible feature.

"Skype users are communicating in many different modes, often at the same time," says Josh Silverman, president of Skype. "We thought it was time for software to take that into account. Now video is really bringing together all those modes of communication."

Skype has offered video-calling since late 2005, but the company says that due to a lack of webcam-ready computers, and poor technology, it was an after-thought for many users.

Silverman

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says that the rise of YouTube has now popularised video calls, which already constitute 28% of all calls made on Skype. As a result, the company is now ready to push the service to the forefront by giving computer-based callers a simple way to hold full-screen video chats instead of constricting conversations to a small window in a corner of the screen, as before.

Skype version 4 will also invite users to post bigger photos of themselves, instead of just thumbnail images, to encourage callers to see and be seen. It also incorporates features for non-technical users that detect computer settings, available bandwidth and connected audio or video devices to make getting started easier.

The five-year-old service had 309 million registered users at the end of March, and plays host to 12 million simultaneous users at busy times of day.

Skype claims to have designed data-compression technology that enables rich-quality voice conversations with as little as 2Kb/sec of bandwidth and video calls on connections as slow as 6Kb/sec. However, version 4 of the software will take advantage of faster average speeds, with high-resolution, full-screen Skype video calls requiring 90 Kb/sec ideally.