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We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a couple o

We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a couple of employees working in the mid-west. Nothing has worked as well as Skype but even Skype still seems to have issues with reliability at times, necessitating a reconnect to the call. When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface. Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype. Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)

brown9-2 8y ago
Google Hangouts is pretty decent, especially if you’re already a Google Apps org and you can outfit each conference room with a camera and Chromebox.
maneesh 8y ago
Zoom is the best software in the world for this.
- epistasis 8y ago
  Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  (I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.) Zoom, 1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.) 2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
  - shadowtree 8y ago
    Every Zoom user can set a vanity URL for their meeting space. Most use their firstname+lastname where I work.
    - deathanatos 8y ago
      Well, TIL that existed. It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room. I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker. The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.
nikanj 8y ago
> Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference) Yes. Today, there are N somewhat crappy corporate video conferencing solutions. It's feasible to convince a VC to fund a new one, because they do a lot of video conferencing, and really understand the pain points. Thus, tomorrow there are going to be N+1 somewhat crappy video conferencing solutions. It just seems like one of those "simple on the surface" issues, that turn out to be a massive can of worms.
TorKlingberg 8y ago
That's what we are working on: https://www.starleaf.com/ https://www.starleaf.com/ The apps are free to try if you'd like to. We also do nice hardware setups for meeting rooms. Comments are welcome.
underwater 8y ago
I’ve had a lot of luck with appear.in. It’s a web app but fast. Zero sign up; you just tell people to visit appear.in/<some-unique-string>

brown9-2 8y ago

Google Hangouts is pretty decent, especially if you’re already a Google Apps org and you can outfit each conference room with a camera and Chromebox.

maneesh 8y ago

Zoom is the best software in the world for this.

epistasis 8y ago
Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.
deathanatos 8y ago
(I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.) Zoom, 1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.) 2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
- shadowtree 8y ago
  Every Zoom user can set a vanity URL for their meeting space. Most use their firstname+lastname where I work.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    Well, TIL that existed. It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room. I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker. The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.

nikanj 8y ago

> Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference) Yes. Today, there are N somewhat crappy corporate video conferencing solutions. It's feasible to convince a VC to fund a new one, because they do a lot of video conferencing, and really understand the pain points. Thus, tomorrow there are going to be N+1 somewhat crappy video conferencing solutions. It just seems like one of those "simple on the surface" issues, that turn out to be a massive can of worms.

TorKlingberg 8y ago

That's what we are working on: https://www.starleaf.com/ https://www.starleaf.com/ The apps are free to try if you'd like to. We also do nice hardware setups for meeting rooms. Comments are welcome.

underwater 8y ago

I’ve had a lot of luck with appear.in. It’s a web app but fast. Zero sign up; you just tell people to visit appear.in/<some-unique-string>