What you should know about the video conferencing landscape
Before Product Hunt, I spent several years building a competitor to Zoom (not successful, but quite rewarding). I’m left with a healthy appreciation for how difficult these tools are to build - in fact, they may be one of the most complex, unreliable tools that we use on a daily basis. On the surface, video chat seems simple, but under the hood there are a myriad of adaptations and tradeoffs that are being made every few milliseconds in response to network and device conditions. Speed matters. Reliability matters. Resolution matters. It’s like the internet itself - dive a bit under the surface and there be dragons.
I was recently rereading the classic marketing textbook "Crossing the Chasm," and in one of the chapters, the author talks about how technologies that seem quite compelling on the surface can actually take a very, very long time to reach mainstream, to, quote, "cross the chasm." The author gave two examples of such technologies. One was neural networks, and this was 30 years ago. And the other one was, as he put it, quote, "desktop video chat." The author was indeed correct. It took a global pandemic and 30 years in order to make desktop video meetings standard.
A Brief History of Video Conferencing
The first generation of video chat tools were video bolt-ons to what were fundamentally teleconferencing tools. These were relatively high friction to set up and often brittle, but served their purpose. These include WebEx, Uber Conference, and others.
The next generation of tools are still fundamentally similar in their model, which is you generate a meeting link and access it that way, but are infinitely more robust than their predecessors. These include apps like Zoom, Meet, and more broadly integrated apps like Teams.
The third generation of tools were influenced by Zoom and the global pandemic. They break out of the box of what a video conference is and include radically new approaches and improvements to video conferencing like Around, as well as very different form factors, including virtual offices like Gather, Roam, and Tandem. It also includes a new generation of more focused video tools, like Around, which is particularly good for designers and engineers, and Tuple, for pair programming
What's important in video conferencing
When you're meeting with people who have limited familiarity with different video products, it can be really important to use a standard tool like Zoom or Meet, especially if you're meeting with external parties and you want to make sure that they can use it. Anytime someone on the call has an issue, it affects everybody on the call. That's why reliability and good usability are so important.For smaller teams, earlier companies, and for internal collaboration, however, this is where you may want to look into alternative tools in order to get an edge from a cultural standpoint and a collaboration standpoint.
Other things to consider are the ease of calendar integration, the kinds of security protocols and admin controls that you have, the relative strength of these conferencing solutions for internal versus external calls, and the overall feel and delight of these products.
Hot take 1. You don't have to use the same video tools inside the company as you do outside the company.
Hot take 2. For inside the company, I'm biased, but I think it's very much worth using a virtual office tool, although they're far from widely adopted. The reason is that the informal chats or the meetings in between meetings will not happen without a tool like Gather, Roam or my former company, Tandem.
The Players
For video chats that are incredibly reliable and have a very familiar UX to most people, it's hard to beat Zoom. At this point, video chat is like a utility. And under the hood, Zoom has an extraordinary amount of custom engineering with the same end result, which is that they give every client, every phone or laptop, and every user on a call, the maximum video resolution that their internet and laptop can take, period. The UX is clunky and generally not fun, but if you've got people with bad laptops and bad internet, Zoom is going to be hard to beat.
For a free alternative that's relatively solid, Google Meet is also great.
If your team is generally on a modern stack, has good laptops, and good connectivity, you can experiment with some new wave apps. Try Around for video calls built for designers and engineers. Try Tuple for pair programming. And in the virtual office category, consider Roam and Gather for a very playful 2D version of virtual offices. Also, check out Noor Chat and Kumospace.
Conclusion
Despite a fair bit of writing about how asynchronous work culture can be optimal and our general love of autonomy, and cultural distaste for meetings, video conferencing meetings remain essential. The underlying physics here is relatively well-studied. Video chat builds trust. Talking in real time builds trust much faster than text chat, and trust is the greatest factor for great collaboration. Embrace it. Pick a good video tool and get talking!