Article posted on August 1, 2019

Zoom is excited to announce an increase in Business users’ base capacity for video meetings. As part of the latest platform update, Zoom customers with Business subscriptions can enjoy three times as many video participants in their meetings at no additional cost — and without doing a thing. Increasing capacity from 100 to 300 video participants for Business subscribers ensures more people can reliably participate in your Zoom video-enabled meetings.

The fact is, there are communications services that may offer high meeting capacities, but the fine print often tells a different story when it comes to how many can participate using video. That’s because on traditionally architected communications platforms, meeting attendees tend to experience a drop in quality as more people join via video. (Think about how well your home wi-fi network would stand up if everyone in the house started streaming video on multiple devices at the same time.)

At Buzzfire, we are committed to supporting our great customers, and we want to ensure that our Business subscribers have all the video capacity and quality they need for their important meetings. Further, such an increase is made possible in the way the Zoom platform is engineered, and we wanted to share more about how Zoom’s architecture is able to support increased video capacity with ease.

The Advantage of Video-First Engineering

Zoom can support increased video participation capacity without degradation in quality because we’re the only service built from the ground up for video. From the very beginning, Zoom was engineered to be cloud-native and optimized for video. Other approaches to date have attempted to add video to an aging, pre-existing conference call, screen sharing, or chat tools.

Delivering reliable video at scale is complex, and retrofitting it for a legacy solution results in a clunky experience. Those vendors that decided to bolt on video after the fact, then, have severely limited reliability, functionality, and quality, and it’s clear in the performance of their video meetings.

Behind the Technology

There are two important aspects of Zoom’s technology stack: the cloud network and the video architecture.

The cloud network

Zoom has built a system of data centers, interlinked through private connections that are closely maintained, monitored, and optimized by teams of experienced operations engineers. This network provides global connectivity and enables users around the world, joining from different types of networks, to reliably meet with the highest quality of experience. Today, Zoom has 13 co-located data centers globally and continuously invest in and expand this network.

The video architecture

Our architecture has been optimized to handle video’s demanding requirements, and there are four key features that differentiate our back-end technology and cloud-native infrastructure:

1. Distributed architecture: Instead of a centralized approach, we’ve built an architecture that enables meetings to be distributed across our data center network, seamlessly allowing users to join meetings via private connection to the closest data center. This gives our platform scalability, so we can provide a reliable video experience for up to thousands of people in a single meeting.
2. Multimedia routing: Legacy systems tend to use a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) to choose a stream before delivering it to a device, which requires resource-intensive computing and limits the quality and scalability of those systems. Multimedia routing, on the other hand, delivers multiple video streams from other meeting participants to the client’s device, reducing computing power requirements and ensuring a highly scalable system. Multimedia routing can support 15x more participants than a standard MCU, which generally supports fewer than 100 participants.
3. Multi-bitrate encoding: In addition to stream routing, each stream by itself can adjust to multiple resolutions. This eliminates the need to encode and decode the streams for each endpoint, optimizing performance and scalability. This also enables Zoom to provide different levels of video quality based on the device and network capabilities.
4. Application layer quality of service: Our proactive quality-of-service application layer optimizes the video, audio, and screen-sharing experience specifically for each device and the available bandwidth, resulting in the best possible user experience across any network.

For more about Zoom, please contact Buzzfire at 877-289-9347 or email us at info@buzzfire.com

Zoom Announces an Increase in Business Users’ Base Capacity