Why does Zoom seem so much more popular than those older conferencing options? The vid quality is just better? Or UI is easier? Or b/c you don’t need to sign up?
Thanks!
In: Technology
A lot of the older videoconferencing options had problems with lag, stutter, failure to connect, difficulty connecting in certain network configurations, etc. Some of them relied on plugins that could be finicky to install or were often missing (e.g. Silverlight).
Zoom pretty much “just worked”. Most of the others now “just work” too, but they certainly carry some reputational baggage from the dark old days when things were hit or miss. So one part is being born late enough in the game that a lot of the enabling technologies (internet speed, network infrastructure, webcam driver quality, CPU/GPU performance) were mature.
There is a web standard called WebRTC that is now in all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) that solves videoconferencing in-browser, without need of any downloads, and there are some services that are wrapping that in a reasonably easy to use way.
Video conferencing is fairly complex from a network point of view, so there are lots of ways in which it’s tricky to keep secure. Zoom has had a series of fairly careless-looking mistakes. To their credit they seem to be saying and doing the right things about it now, so they may yet earn back the trust they burned by their earlier decisions and mistakes.
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