In an effort to maintain its competitive edge against the rise of Google Hangouts, Skype is now offering group video calls free of charge. The move positions itself to continue to make it one of the top choices for video calling online and through your smartphone and computer devices.

The company has announced that all group calling will be free of charge and no longer will be charging users a small fee for up to 10 people to chat in a video call at once.

The new move is now available from April 28 on Windows, Mac and Xbox One calling.

Skype has yet to launch the free group calling on all platforms, noticeably for smartphones, which the company says will happen in the near future. Skype has offered group calling since 2011, but had been at a premium charge until Google Hangouts began offering the service for free.

The move has been met with widespread optimism that Skype is beginning to understand the market for video calling a lot better than in years' past, when it was largely the only video calling service that was used by the general public. But with Google Hangouts now breaking into the arena and garnering much of that market, the company has been forced to move into new decision-making that it had been putting off.

"We felt that the time was right," Phillip Snalune, general manager of consumer marketing at Skype, was quoted as saying. "We feel there's a healthy use case for group communications and it's something that we wanted to refresh and renew our commitment to."

Skype believes that it can continue to make profits via advertising and that the user experience remains paramount to the company's overall growth and success. Still, adding video group calling for free helps position it against the intrusion of Google Hangouts, which has hit the company.

"If you think about what else is free on Skype - IM, one-to-one video calling - I think there's an underlying expectation that there's a significant use case for free communications associated with the Skype platform," added Snalune.

On the positive side for users, those currently with a subscription for the group video calling service, they will no longer be charged and the new free service will be reflected immediately.