When COVID-19 hit, business and education industries were forced to move their processes online. As a result, Zoom scaled from 20 million to 300 million users practically overnight. This shift led to a $127 million increase in revenue over the span of a single quarter. Current reports have shown Zoom’s consumer base growth at 354% since March 2020. The question now is, how did Zoom actually manage to scale so quickly?
Zoom defines its architecture as a video-first and cloud-native. They believe that by maintaining this video-first mindset they will be able to easily scale and keep their customers happy. Even back in 2019, Zoom was setting itself up for global expansion by partnering with several different software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to help maintain their platform. This collection of SaaS companies includes AWS, Equinox, and Oracle. Their cloud-based architecture was paramount in their ability to scale when COVID-19 hit.
Zoom’s underlying architecture utilizes the Scaling Video Coding (SVC) protocols rather than Advanced Video coding (AVC). This means that rather than compressing and transmitting a video stream as a single stream with a single bit rate they send videos as a single stream with multiple layers. Although this can increase the bandwidth required to transmit these videos, it has a lot of different benefits. This includes preventing latency, increasing network compatibility, and decreasing the likelihood of somebody getting dropped off the call due to network capabilities. The multiple layers in SVC allow for higher quality, meaning the more layers the higher quality your individual transmission will be. If you have a weaker network connection your video will be transmitted at a lower quality so that it doesn’t eat into bandwidth that you don’t have and ensures you continue to transmit and receive video and audio throughout your call.
Another factor that contributed to Zoom's success this year was their four different account plans: Basic, Pro, Business, and United Pro. Beyond this, they also added specific packages scaled for Education, Telehealth, and Developers. Zoom Basic is the free version of Zoom that allows users to conduct video conferencing calls without all the bells and whistles that their premium accounts offer. Prior to the pandemic, one of the major limitations of Zoom Basic was that it capped your calls at 40 minutes; however, they temporarily got rid of this restriction to assist those dealing with virtual work this year. Appendix A provides a more detailed depiction of the baseline differences between these account types.
To assess whether account type affects the quality of a call a series of test calls of varying sizes were conducted on Basic, Student, and Pro accounts. Zoom calls were conducted with groups of 4, 15, and 80 members. Members were asked to use the raise hand feature available on all account types to indicate when they either heard a verbal cue or saw a visual cue on a shared screen. There was no discernable difference in these response times based on account type; however, it was easiest to identify these response times in the Pro accounts because of the in-call polling tool. The polling tool allowed the call host to view what members had responded to the poll and when.
Zoom defines its architecture as a video-first and cloud-native. They believe that by maintaining this video-first mindset they will be able to easily scale and keep their customers happy. Even back in 2019, Zoom was setting itself up for global expansion by partnering with several different software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to help maintain their platform. This collection of SaaS companies includes AWS, Equinox, and Oracle. Their cloud-based architecture was paramount in their ability to scale when COVID-19 hit.
Zoom’s underlying architecture utilizes the Scaling Video Coding (SVC) protocols rather than Advanced Video coding (AVC). This means that rather than compressing and transmitting a video stream as a single stream with a single bit rate they send videos as a single stream with multiple layers. Although this can increase the bandwidth required to transmit these videos, it has a lot of different benefits. This includes preventing latency, increasing network compatibility, and decreasing the likelihood of somebody getting dropped off the call due to network capabilities. The multiple layers in SVC allow for higher quality, meaning the more layers the higher quality your individual transmission will be. If you have a weaker network connection your video will be transmitted at a lower quality so that it doesn’t eat into bandwidth that you don’t have and ensures you continue to transmit and receive video and audio throughout your call.
Another factor that contributed to Zoom's success this year was their four different account plans: Basic, Pro, Business, and United Pro. Beyond this, they also added specific packages scaled for Education, Telehealth, and Developers. Zoom Basic is the free version of Zoom that allows users to conduct video conferencing calls without all the bells and whistles that their premium accounts offer. Prior to the pandemic, one of the major limitations of Zoom Basic was that it capped your calls at 40 minutes; however, they temporarily got rid of this restriction to assist those dealing with virtual work this year. Appendix A provides a more detailed depiction of the baseline differences between these account types.
To assess whether account type affects the quality of a call a series of test calls of varying sizes were conducted on Basic, Student, and Pro accounts. Zoom calls were conducted with groups of 4, 15, and 80 members. Members were asked to use the raise hand feature available on all account types to indicate when they either heard a verbal cue or saw a visual cue on a shared screen. There was no discernable difference in these response times based on account type; however, it was easiest to identify these response times in the Pro accounts because of the in-call polling tool. The polling tool allowed the call host to view what members had responded to the poll and when.
Comments
Post a Comment