Responding to consumer demand, Skype Ltd is going ahead with a public beta of a group video chat function. The free feature will let up to five people participate in a video call simultaneously. But will this appeal to businesses?

Skype plans to start charging for group video along with some other upcoming features in three or four months. Initially it will target the “consumer business segment”, essentially meaning for friends and family as well as small, sales-drive businesses with a distributed workforce.

Group video chat will first be available to those who use Skype on Windows PCs. The company expects to roll out a Mac version later this year.

Skype, which was sold late last year by eBay Inc. for about $2 billion to an investor group that includes Skype's founders, is also expanding its monthly subscription offerings to include calls to both cellphones and landlines in more than 170 countries.

Skype is set to unveil new subscriptions that let users choose which countries they want to call and whether they want to call either a landline or a cellphone. As it stands, Skype presently focuses more on landline calling to the PSTN (public switched telephone network).