What Zoom Can Do
Before we get into how to set up Zoom and use it, let me sketch an overview of what Zoom offers across their software and some optional hardware so you can understand the scope of your options.
Zoom offers videoconferencing, a feature this book devotes a lot of attention to, because it’s what most people are looking for and how most people spend their time using Zoom as a product.
Videoconferencing obviously includes two or more people using audio and video to communicate with each other in a live session (Figure 2). One person has to be the host: they create a meeting and have superpowers, which in some tiers of service they can partially delegate to other people or hand off entirely.
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. (Web apps have fewer features than the company’s native apps.)
Each participant may be able see the live streaming video camera of everyone else, or sometimes just one 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 choose to not enable it. Those who dial in from a regular telephone also 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 that everyone can see, as well as private messages to the host or among participants.
Zoom Meetings & Chat is broken out into price tiers, which start at free. That tier includes nearly all important functionality with modest limitations, such as a 40-minute meeting length for sessions with three or more participants. Paid tiers lift meeting limits and add additional account features, including cloud recording. I explain this in full in Choose a Tier.
Zoom also offers registered users chat outside of meetings in which they’re participating, if the users are part of each other’s contacts or part of the same organization. The chat feature is weak, so it’s largely useful inside organizations that have standardized on Zoom and within meetings. Every other major messaging service offers better features.
While webinar may be one of the most annoying words coined in the last 30 years, and scrape the mental blackboard like the word “moist” for some people, it’s popular for lecturers, small businesses, educators, and massive corporations to use these web-based video presentations to reach 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 10,000 live viewers.
For organizations, the firm offers Zoom Rooms ($49 per month), a conference-room hardware product that connects to existing telecommunications systems and integrates with digitally connected whiteboards. It works with a wide array of conference-room gear from many companies.
Zoom announced on July 15, 2020 that it would offer Zoom for Home, a series of home-focused hardware. The first entrant, the Zoom for Home–DTEN Me is a $599 standalone “appliance” dedicated entirely to Zoom videoconferencing. (It’s produced for Zoom by conference-equipment maker DTEN.) This model sports a 27-inch touchscreen with three wide-angle webcams and an array of eight mics. It includes HDMI input so it can double as an external monitor.
The market? Some combination of people using Zoom constantly and businesses that want to equip home workers with a single easy-to-manage device. It’s slated to ship in August 2020.