Zoom Videoconferencing

Zoom’s best-known and most commonly used feature is videoconferencing. Videoconferencing includes two or more people using audio and video to communicate with each other in a live session (Figure 1).

One person has to be the host: they create a meeting and have superpowers. Everyone else is a participant, someone who has varying abilities in a meeting depending on what the host permits them to do and what’s available in their app or supported by the browser they’re using. Participants might also be called attendees or members.

Each participant may be able to see the live streaming video camera of everyone else, or sometimes just one person at a time—or just a presenter or meeting host.

Zoom videoconferencing, called Zoom Meetings & Chat, also includes:

• Audio-only participation: People in a Zoom meeting don’t have to have a camera or can opt to not stream video from theirs. Those who dial in from a telephone can use only the audio features.

• Viewer/listener only: A Zoom participant can be a completely passive observer and not send their audio or video into the meeting.

• Screen sharing: A Zoom host or participant can share their live screen. If the host allows it, multiple people can share screens simultaneously from desktop apps at once.

• Screen annotation: Participants can mark up a screen that everyone can see.

• Public and private chat: Zoom allows participants to send text messages within the meeting. These may be to everyone or as private messages to the host, co-hosts, or other participants.

• Recording and streaming: With the permission of a host or configuration by the host, a meeting can have its audio, video, and chat recorded for playback, or be livestreamed to online services that allow live video viewing.

Zoom Meetings & Chat is broken out into price tiers, which start with a free level. That tier includes nearly all important functionality, including live transcription. Zoom imposes modest limitations, such as a 40-minute meeting length for sessions. Paid tiers lift meeting time limits, may allow a higher maximum number of meeting members than 100, and add account features, such as cloud recording. I explain this in full in Choose a Tier.

Zoom also lets registered users chat outside of meetings in which they’re participating. This is easiest if the users are part of each other’s contacts or part of the same organization, but you can also chat with any registered Zoom user if you know their email address. The chat feature isn’t that robust, so it’s largely useful inside organizations that have standardized on Zoom and within meetings—every other major messaging service offers better features. However, Zoom keeps working on it to make it more Slack-like, and it might eventually serve an organization paying for Zoom well enough.

In April 2022, Zoom also added a global collaborative drawing tool called Zoom Whiteboard. It competes with product features in other collaborative and standalone software. You can use Zoom Whiteboard outside of Zoom meetings. (See Collaborate with a Whiteboard.)

Other Zoom Products

Webinar may be one of the most annoying words coined in the last 30 years, and it scrapes the mental blackboard like the word “moist” for some people. But webinars are a popular content format for lecturers, educators, and small and large businesses to reach often large audiences. Zoom Video Webinars can be presented from the same software used for regular videoconferences, and can include up to 100 interactive video hosts or participants and up to 50,000 live viewers.

For organizations, the firm offers Zoom Rooms ($49 per month), a conference-room hardware product that hooks into existing telecommunications systems and integrates with digitally connected whiteboards. It works with a wide array of conference-room gear.

Zoom also offers a line of Zoom for Home hardware, devices intended for home users and work-from-home users. The first entrant that shipped, the Zoom for Home–DTEN Me, is a $599 standalone “appliance” dedicated to Zoom videoconferencing produced for Zoom by conference-equipment maker DTEN.

Other hardware includes devices made for Zoom or compatible with Zoom from Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Lenovo.

The market is both for individuals who want a single, simple, high-quality option that’s always available and easy to use, and for companies that want to equip a large mass of workers at home with hardware that’s designed to work well and is easy to support uniformly.