Is Zoom past its sell by date?

#1

Zoom keeps cutting out for us. It’s nothing to do with Smoothbook. The sound is frequently crackly and difficult for participants to hear. it is not something that we are doing as we are doing exactly the same as we did when it was running really consiistently well. Reports are coming from people who hold meetings throughout the day through zoom and they say it’s gone haywire. We have had our first student saying they are not going to join us on line because they are having such trouble with zoom they think it would be stressful. (He is a musician and knows his stuff). He told me he was picking up videos on you tub. If you look at the outage map for Uk its really heavy in London and sweeping up through Birmingham and Manchester into the North and in USA also.

We are seriously considering looking at other options but this is such a perfect system through smoothbook and there has been so much gone into it loathe to leave it. Quandary. :roll_eyes: :thinking: :lying_face:
James do you know anything about any other streaming systems that may be an option if we have to leave zoom
Thanks
Andrea

#2

Hi Andrea,

To be honest I don’t use Zoom nearly as much as you guys so I can’t speak to the quality of the meetings. I do know that, from a technical point of view, streaming video is very challenging and obviously at the moment there are extreme amounts of video being streamed. So you may find the issues are more to do with your internet network being overloaded: other services may well have the same problem.

Having said that, Skype is probably the oldest and most used service (and has the advantage of being free); there’s goto meeting and I’ve used Google hangouts quite a bit in the past without any problems (although I don’t think that’s free).

#3

Ah that’s interesting re the internet network, And yes we often see it on tv where they are loosing the connections or the sound is bad I think a lot of them use zoom We’re paying just under £20 per month for zoom so it may be worth checking some of the others in case. Thanks for the information

#4

Although Zoom is good we have been looking at all systems one we are testing now is called Jitsi and is free and worth a look.

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#5

oh that’s something to check out - thanks and if you go for it would appreciate your feedback.

#6

Hey I used webex, only moving to zoom because of the smoothbook intergration.
I found webex much more stable and user friendly, eg, could send link to people on the fly and the all unmute in particular. However the smoothbook intergration is worth doing.