Lockdown Zooms Out, but Zoom Isn’t Locked Out

While mass vaccination helps to reduce the pandemics, and so people do not have to keep the distance that strictly, it seems that video conferencing should become less of a thing. Indeed, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and their likes enjoy even greater popularity than a year before. Now it’s no more a necessity: it’s a choice.

According to the research by Sensor Tower, in 2021, video conferencing apps are being used even heavier than they were a year before, in the middle of pandemic and panic. It’s not hard to explain why their usage rose 21 times higher in H1 2020 compared to 2019. But it keeps growing. By June 2021, the overall growth was 151% in one year. This can be explained by the time it took many businesses and organizations to restructure their business processes and switch to remote work.

With quantity comes quality. All the services have implemented new features, allowed more participants in conferences, improved video and audio quality, and granted better security. These improvements are meant for both business and entertainment. They include, for example, virtual backgrounds, filters, social games, as well as e-commerce solutions. Probably there will be no exclusives that last for long, as all the services try to keep up with each other. The overall experience, though, will differ anyway, at least because of integration with other services.

The video conferencing services in question include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. Unsurprisingly, the increase in traffic and time spent online in these services does not mean accordingly growing influx of new users. Many of them have installed and maybe learned to use these services before, but it happened only recently that they tasted it. Still, there are more new users now than there were before the pandemic spread in 2020.