Companies vying for video chats

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, this has become an era of Zoom birthdays, virtual happy hours, FaceTime story times and Google yoga classes. Our friends, coworkers, teachers — and doctors, if we’re lucky — now largely exist as faces in rectangles on our phones and computer screens.

With people’s social lives moved indefinitely online, a bevy of big and small tech companies want to unseat fast-rising Zoom from its perch atop the heap, given security concerns and other issues with the video-calling service. There were already several smaller contenders for the throne, and now there’s a big one as well: Facebook.

Zoom, which boasts 300 million users, had the luck to be in the right place at the right time just as millions of employees around the world suddenly found themselves ordered to work from home. But the service has always been focused on business users, and it shows. Inviting people to video chats is cumbersome — for instance, Zoom generates an invitation more than 20 lines long that offers a bewildering number of ways to connect (H.323/SIP protocol, anyone?). Its textchat system is rudimentary and it gives people exactly two emojis for reacting to others in video — a wave and a thumbs-up.

Smaller services like Houseparty, which launched in 2016, think this gives them an opening. The app, owned by Fortnite maker Epic Games, lets up to eight people videochat together in virtual rooms, send video messages called “Facemail” and play games. Houseparty said in late April that it had 50 million new sign-ups in the past month — a figure that’s around 70 times above normal in some areas.

Facebook’s WhatsApp, Apple’s FaceTime and similar Google apps offer group video chat as well, although FaceTime is limited to iPhones and other Apple devices. So do a variety of more business-focused companies: Cisco with WebEx, Microsoft with Skype and Teams, and the smaller company 8x8 with its open-source service Jitsi.