Here's How Zoom Provides Industry-Leading Video Capacity

Zoom is excited to announce an increase in our 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 Zoom, 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 cloud network

The video architecture

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.

No other solution on the market provides a single, integrated, video-first communications platform that is easy to use and designed to provide every global user a reliable, quality meeting experience. If you’re ready to deploy and scale high-quality, intuitive video communications across your organization, sign up for a 1-on-1 demo with a Zoom product specialist today. And for our Business subscribers, enjoy your new video capacity!