Skype voice and video calls route media directly among participants with two exceptions. First, some thin clients on mobile phones and a few embedded devices do

Skype voice and video calls route media directly among participants with two exceptions. First, some thin clients on mobile phones and a few embedded devices don't connect directly to the Skype network, so media streams through Skype gateways operated by Skype or by Skype mobile operator partners. The other exception is for group video calling, a premium service, which redirects video streams through Skype servers to push computational loads for media transcoding from the desktop or mobile clients to Skype's cloud.