Microsoft kills Skype support in STAC-VIP

We at Comrex spent the better part of a year developing what we felt was a very cool feature in our STAC-VIP product--the ability to integrate with Skype. At the time, the Skype folks were invested in this and helpful. We even had to run the certification gamut, sending a sample to Estonia and having to make all sorts of adjustments to meet their requirements. But it passed, and we were able to introduce the first pro-broadcast gear with Skype support. We were very proud, and it has been received very well.

Enter Microsoft one year ago, purchasing Skype  The first thing they did was to kill the program that allowed us to integrate, called Skypekit. But we were already past the goal line, and they assured us they would still honor registration requests from our products indefinitely.

Today we got notice that STAC-VIP (or any other Skypekit-based products) would be retired from the Skype network on August 4. This means your STAC-VIP will likely be unable to register with Skype.

As you can imagine, this is a big disappointment to us. It will certainly cause frustration with some VIP users. There's nothing worse to us than unhappy customers, and when making them happy is out of our control it just adds to the pain.

We've tried to get Microsoft to reconsider, but things look bleak. As an alternative, we recommend considering WebRTC for use with STAC-VIP. Please have a look at our new technote.

Edit 8/14/14: For clarity, Microsoft has informed us of their intention to disallow STAC-VIP to register on the Skype network, even if your unit is currently registered. The units in our lab are still registering and working as of today, so obviously Aug 4 was not a hard deadline, but they are very clear that this will not be the case soon.