A fifth of U.S. adults have engaged in video chats

Nearly 20 percent of all American adults have participated in a video call either online or on their mobile phone, according to a study released today by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.The study, which surveyed 3,001 people over the summer, found that 74 percent of American adults use the Internet. And out of that group, 23 percent of folks have tried video calls, chats, or teleconferences over the Web. Approximately 85 percent of adults use a mobile phone, Pew said, and out of that group, 7 percent of respondents said that they have chatted over video on their handsets. That comes out to about 19 percent of adults having placed at least one video call.Although Pew didn't provide specifics, it indicated that many of the people it surveyed said that they have used both mobile phones and the Web for video chats. In the study it was the first time that the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project asked about the use of video calling online and via cell phones. Pew's findings follow another study released recently by Juniper Research, which estimated that 29 million adults worldwide will be using a smartphone to video chat by 2015. The research firm said that widespread video-calling adoption in the mobile space could be "held back by a lack of interoperability between different devices."