The new service is designed to enable workers or consumers to quickly launch video calls that can support up to 15 people at a time, and integrates with Facebook and Gmail.
Zoom Video Communications is the latest
startup to enter the increasingly crowded video conferencing market, rolling
out a free service called zoom.us that enables up to 15 people to participate
in a video call from PCs or mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.
Zoom officials unveiled zoom.us Aug. 22,
touting the service's easy one-click capabilities and the integration with both
Google's Gmail and Facebook, so contacts from these services are displayed and
users can get a multi-party video call going within seconds. It comes with a
host of features, from the single click needed to start a conversation to the
ability to invite participants via instant message, email and a meeting ID to
being able to share video, text chat in private or as part of a group during
the meeting or conversation.
Company officials are promoting the
cloud-based service for consumers as well as workers.
"Today, group video meetings are the realm of
businesses, but they can be hard to facilitate," Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of
zoom.us, said in a statement. "Users have separate accounts for each video-calling
application, which requires them to remember different usernames and passwords,
and the video quality is often poor. zoom.us takes the complexity out of
connecting to friends and colleagues by offering a single-click solution that
works whether you are on an iPad using WiFi, an iPhone using Edge or a PC
connected to Ethernet and lets everyone participate in the conversation
seamlessly."
Yuan said that video has transformed business
collaboration, and "we want to bring that to everyone with zoom.us."
Video conferencing has become increasingly
popular over the past few years as businesses see the benefits not only of
greater employee productivity and the ability to more easily communicate with
workers, partners and customers, but also as a way of reducing expenses,
including travel costs. Most of the early systems were complex and expensive
room-based offerings from vendors like Cisco Systems, Polycom and
Hewlett-Packard. However, the trend is moving away from these expensive systems
and more toward software, driven by such trends as increasing mobility, cloud
computing and bring-your-own-device (BYOD).
"The videoconferencing market is going
through significant change marked by efforts to make the historically
cost-prohibitive technology more widely accessible," Forrester analyst Philipp
Karcher said in an Aug.
21 blog post. "After a boom period sparked by interest in high-definition
quality and epitomized by investments in multi-screen immersive telepresence
studios, videoconferencing innovation today is happening on smaller screens
like PCs, smartphones and tablets that workers use in their everyday jobs. In
response to this growing interest, vendors not only have to show strategies
that account for desktop and mobile applications-they also have to make their
traditional dedicated room-based systems easier to deploy at scale."
Established vendors like Cisco, Polycom
and LifeSize
Communications are shifting their strategies toward software, and are being
challenged by relative newcomers
like Vidyo, whose entire portfolio is software-based. At the same time,
consumer services-particularly Skype, now owned by Microsoft-are looking to
expand into multi-party video calls, hoping to attract business users looking for
inexpensive solutions for smaller video conferences that can be launched
quickly and don't need the features of the large immersive systems.
Zoom.us could also play in this space. It
doesn't offer all of the features that a solution from other vendors might, but
it's free and has capabilities such as high-definition 720p video and the
ability to share a full desktop or specific window, and it can work over wired
and WiFi networks, and 3G and 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks. It also
supports systems running Windows as well as Apple's Mac system, iPhones and
iPads. Android support reportedly is coming later.
In a review
Aug. 21, TheWall Street
Journal's Walt Mossberg said the service worked well, particularly given
that it's free.
"I've been testing Zoom.us, and despite a few
limitations, I like it a lot and can recommend it," Mossberg wrote. "In all but
one of my tests, video was sharp and smooth, and all the features worked as
promised. One caveat: I tested a pre-release version at a time when there were
only about 1,000 people using the service. It's possible that if millions use
it, speed and quality could suffer, though the company denies that. And for
now, the service is entirely free, the company said, but down the road it may
impose charges based on time used."
There are some drawbacks, he said.
"You can share a video from your computer
with the group, but the audio won't come through. And if you log in via Gmail,
only a subset of your Google chat contacts appear," Mossberg said. "Also, the
early version I tried changed your Google chat status to say you were using
Zoom. The company says it's working on the audio issue, eliminating the changed
status message, and that the Gmail contacts limitation is a Google policy."
To get started, users must download the zoom.us app, or get it from Apple's
iTunes store.
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