A new Skype experience in the living room, with Xbox One

Over the past few years, Skype has made forays into the living room with a number of collaborations with third parties. These used smart TVs or Blu-ray boxes, paired with cameras. Now owned by Microsoft, Skype has a new way of chatting from the comfort of your sofa, and this time it’s a first party product: the Xbox One.

Xbox One systems will come with Skype preinstalled, and since every unit will also ship with a Kinect, they’ll also include 1080p-capable cameras and beamforming stereo microphones, making them pretty much the perfect setup for a Skype-on-TV experience. As an added bonus, Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers buying Xbox Ones will also get Skype Premium for free for six months, enabling group video calls and 100 minutes of telephone calling to some 60 countries.

We spent some time in Skype’s Stockholm office last week and talked to Todd Roshak, program manager for Skype on Xbox, to learn more about Microsoft’s plans for the client.