Microsoft’s Teams group is addressing bandwidth issues for people who use the collaboration platform to work from home.
Google is enhancing Meet to ensure that it is suitable for the job of conducting video conferences at home or at work during strict conditions, such as when children are broadcasting video at the same time as a work meeting needs to happen.
Microsoft is now facing the same challenge for Teams – the chat, video and collaboration platform that has at least 115 million daily active users.
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The company is following Zoom’s strategy, which prioritizes audio over video to ensure that users are heard over a poor broadband connection.
“If you want to preserve data or are in a location with a poor or limited network connection, it is sometimes useful to limit the amount of data you are using during a video call,” explains Microsoft in an update to its roadmap. .
“A new low data volume mode allows users to limit the amount of data that will be used during Teams video calls, as well as to establish different settings based on network availability.”
Google is also trying to resolve poor network connections for people working at home, automatically adjusting resource usage depending on network conditions, at home or on a corporate network.
In January, Google offered Workspace users a new troubleshooting tool for Google Meet that shows users why a local setting may be providing a poor audio or video experience. For remote workers, it also provided a new viewing experience to help users separate slow video and mute microphones before entering a call.
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Microsoft will start rolling out its low-volume feature to users this month. As noted by OnMSFT, the feature allows users to limit the amount of data used in video calls.
The Microsoft 365 and Teams group was busy during the pandemic, closing the resource gaps between Teams and Zoom. One of the biggest was the lack of a grid view of 49 people, which Microsoft addressed in late 2020.
Zoom, meanwhile, reported stellar earnings in the fourth quarter that are rapidly approaching $ 1 billion per quarter, up from $ 106 million for the same period in 2019. The videoconferencing company has grown by more than 400 % year-on-year in use by small and medium-sized businesses.