[recursive]

Hangouts works far better for me than Skype. It just works. With skype, I struggle to even create video conversation. I remember one fateful day when I tried 4 different devices with skype installed, and had a complete failure to get any of them to work.

[bad_user]

It depends on your location I guess. I'm from Romania and travel and speak with people mostly in Europe. I've had the same failure you mention with Hangouts. And video quality was never OK whenever I tried, with frames being dropped and so on. Whereas Skype has been OK even on my mobile 3G/4G connection and I'm a heavy user.

In fairness, Skype had a couple of major network outages. Maybe you hit one of those.

[FireBeyond]

Hangouts is horrific on a Mac. It'll peg an i7 with discrete graphics at 80%+ CPU, and run at 170F for the length of the call.