![]() Zoom has been pushing hard to dream up and build new features into its product, while still keeping the experience simple. Today Zoom is well ahead of Apple in videoconferencing, especially for business purposes. Meanwhile, FaceTime is free, period for Apple, it’s a benefit of buying into the company’s ecosystem rather than a profit center unto itself. One other difference between Zoom and FaceTime involves the price of admission, Zoom offers a free version that limits group calls to 40 minutes and paid plans that start at $150 a year. The feature is based on an API that any developer can use, so additional applications-including more business-oriented ones such as shared whiteboarding-are likely. (Actually watching TikToks together could become a new national pastime). As for video content, Apple says Disney+, ESPN+, HBO Max, and Hulu (but not Netflix) have already integrated SharePlay into their apps, as have Twitch and TikTok. Videoconferencing has become too big a part of life for Apple to treat as a minor part of its portfolio.The music content comes from Apple Music. This might be used to transmit the sound of a forest setting or a symphony hall during a FaceTime call. The feature creates “a sound field that makes conversations flow as easily as they do face-to-face,” said Apple software chief Craig Federighi during the WWDC keynote on Monday.Īnother new FaceTime feature called Wide Spectrum allows the user to set the microphones on their device to capture a wide spectrum of background sound. The new version will get Spatial Audio, so that the voices on a FaceTime call sound spread out–as if they’re coming from the place on the screen where the person speaking is. Still, Apple has added some interesting tricks of its own to FaceTime, mainly by leveraging its audio engineering prowess. It lets you draw annotations on shared screens, offers more options for sharing links to videoconferences, and builds in features for conducting webinars as well as video conferences. It has a Touch Up My Appearance feature that smooths out your complexion. Examples: It offers virtual backgrounds that can make it look like you’re dialing in from the beach or from Mars. Zoom still has a lot of features that FaceTime doesn’t have. (Microsoft Teams beat both companies to offering such a feature.)Ī feature-for-feature comparison only goes so far. Zoom added a blurred background feature to its app in March to my eye the Zoom blurred background looks every bit as good as Apple’s. Zoom’s gallery view is very similar to FaceTime’s grid view.Īpple says it’s using the technology behind the iPhone camera’s popular Portrait Mode to blur the background and make the user’s face stand out in FaceTime. The app defaults to Active Speaker mode, in which the app detects who’s talking, and makes that person’s face larger than the others on the screen. Zoom on mobile supports up to 100 participants. The image of the person talking enlarges a bit, and you see a border around their picture. To better manage higher numbers of participants-perhaps for business calls-Apple added a new grid view in iOS 15, stacking up users on the screen Brady Bunch-style. That many faces can be pretty unwieldy on an iPhone, though it works better on an iPad or Mac. FaceTime can support up to 32 people on a call (plus the user who initiated it).
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