Microsoft has announced the launch of 25 person Skype group video calling. The feature is rolling out now to users on iPhone, iPad, and Android in Western Europe and North America. The roll-out in these markets should be completed over the next week or so with full availability worldwide expected in March.

For the ultimate get together experience, group video calls are in glorious HD quality and optimized specifically for the device you’re using, giving a more natural feel to the call. The person talking is displayed front and center and video is immersive and full screen. Audio is also crystal clear, thanks to our SILK Super Wide Band audio codec in our cloud conferencing stack. To achieve this, we’re proud to have worked with one of Microsoft’s biggest partners, Intel, which helped enable us to optimize SILK Audio specifically for Azure running on Intel processors.

The group video calling feature was previously limited to 5 participants but is now capable of conferencing 25 participants. You can flip between a grid view and a focus view where Skype automatically focuses on the active speaker, or lets you choose which participant to ‘Pin’ to the stage.

Inviting absolutely anyone
To make it even easier to get talking, a few months ago we announced a simple new way to invite anyone to a Skype call from a computer. We have now extended this to Skype for iPhone, iPad and Android, so that you can use this feature to invite anyone to a pre-existing group conversation. The best thing is that they don’t need to be in your Skype contact list — or even have a Skype account. All you need to do is start a chat on your iPhone, iPad or Android and share the unique conversation link however you want — via email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter or Facebook. If they have Skype, they’ll join your conversation by clicking on the link and if they don’t, they can join the group video call on a computer using Skype for Web.

You can download the latest version of Skype from the links below…

[iPhone] [iPad] [Mac]