Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

It just amazes me that the "just works" solution here is still a native app. Plenty of reasons to use native apps but in 2020 video conferencing really isn't one: WebRTC is capable and supported by every major desktop and mobile browser. It's literally one click and you're done!

View on HN

None of the WebRTC based options just work, they're all glitchy and cannot scale up to even moderate amounts of users. We have Google Hangouts Meet for free for our org, and we still pay for Zoom because It Just Works.

Yeah. And high fidelity sync between audio (ideally via phone). Maybe someone does it, but we tried _all_ vendors and settled on Zoom. And screen annotations, and the ability to remember participants' phones and dial them directly (replaces them having to type 9 digit numbers into their phones), etc.

Also, Zoom has reached a critical mass where, particularly for sales calls, the remote party is quite likely to have it installed. The network effect here is really valuable.

Same here, we used hangouts for the longest time but it got worse. Zoom just works perfectly all the time.

Even having the "unblock this site from camera and microphone" burried in the browser chrome or settings pages somewhere is a dealbreaker. It's too easy for people to mindlessly click "no" to can this access your microphone, because of the way the browser pops it up during first use, instead of during "install."

True. Even the adblocker and autoplay blockers can prevent video and audio from working in Hangouts. I have had issues with hangouts when joining meetings with important people — and my browser’s autoplay block feature prevented the video feed from working.

Maybe it has to do with the plan you have? I've used Google Meet with up to ~150 participants and it was fine, but we have an Enterprise account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com