It has been a rollercoaster year for video conferencing apps in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The lockdowns and quarantines around the world have made these tool pivotal to businesses and personal relationships, especially Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While they may suffer slightly when vaccines hit the market and less people need to work from home, they will still remain much more widely used than they were pre-pandemic.
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Zoom has been the major benefactor in the space over the last 12 months, and Microsoft wants a bigger piece of that pie. Microsoft’s primary business-focused video conferencing app will now offer a free tier with a 24-hour time limit on calls. It is pivoting this feature to individuals rather than businesses, just in time for the holidays.
Up to 300 people will be able to join a single room, with a gallery view that can display up to 49 of those participants at once. The equivalent feature on Zoom is only available to 100 people in a single call.
Another feature, called Together Mode, will arrange everyone’s video feeds so it looks like they’re sitting together in a theatre or coffee shop.
These calls will be available through a web browser and doesn’t need the use of the applications (on a smart device or computer). The user that starts the call will need a Microsoft account, however, which shouldn’t be a problem for most – users of Xbox or Microsoft Office already have one. Other users don’t need to have an account, which is good news for friends and families spending the holidays far apart.
Whether these features will remain with Microsoft Teams into 2021 is still unknown, but it does give users more flexibility compared to Zoom at the moment. Zoom still has a 40 minute call limit for free calls, which is temporarily increased for the holiday season.
