[HN Gopher] Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its s...
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Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its service
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 312 points
Date : 2021-11-02 11:26 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.zoom.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.zoom.us)
| travisgriggs wrote:
| The internet was supposed to be better than what TV in the 80s
| became.
|
| It's more interactive now, but it's starting to feel like a rerun
| lately.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is better. People are free to write software, pay for
| bandwidth and computing costs, and content creation, and then
| distribute it for free.
|
| People no longer have to depend on coaxial cable owners or
| satellite owners or TV airwaves owners to distribute their
| content.
| mattl wrote:
| Said who?
| speedgoose wrote:
| travisgriggs, his username is placed above his message.
| mdoms wrote:
| I don't get why so many people use Zoom. I think it's an American
| thing? No one around here uses it. Even if we ignore the very
| serious China problem (which, we shouldn't) and the numerous
| security and privacy lapses (again, we shouldn't) it's simply a
| vastly inferior product to alternatives from Google. Apple,
| Microsoft and even some smaller orgs. The desktop UI is
| horrendous, confusing and stagnant. The video quality is ok, but
| the audio quality doesn't hold a candle to Google's Meet product.
| munk-a wrote:
| And overnight Skype became relevant again.
| shiohime wrote:
| > Company creates a super successful product that is very user
| friendly > Said product skyrockets and makes the company more
| money than they ever should have reasonably expected > SV mindset
| of perpetual growth kicks in and corporate greed figures out ways
| to extract money even though they already fucking made it >
| Product quality degrades over time
|
| It's like clockwork. Yeah I'm sure that it costs a ton of money
| to maintain their product to scale. But you've gotta be kidding
| me that they didn't already make the money they should have
| needed to support this growth if you look at their net worth vs
| pre-pandemic and post-pandemic.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Did they finally realize that the 45min time limit on the free
| plan was a feature? :)
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I can't wait to see a 30 second video ad for an erectile
| dysfunction drug in the middle of a job interview.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Seems more like an opportunity. "Hey, how did they know you're
| interviewing someone who can solve hard problems?"
| dcchambers wrote:
| Probably a red flag if the company you're interviewing with is
| using the Zoom free tier ;)
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| There are better ad-free tools like FaceTime (which can be used
| on the web) for speaking with friends and family.
| omershapira wrote:
| I feel like for every business there exists threshold where PMs
| get convinced that selling ads isn't just a free-tier business
| model, but rather that any other revenue generation method sits
| within the Pareto frontier that an ads tier defines.
|
| I once heard an ads account PM put it this way: "If you have
| enough money to buy a no-ads tier, someone will pay more to put
| an ad there"
| mikepurvis wrote:
| This definitely happened for cable TV and satellite radio--
| both started life as a paid, ad-free alternative, but the
| promise of a premium market that moneyed individuals had paid
| to escape to was just too enticing.
|
| To a lesser extent you see it with magazines too, especially in
| the fashion space, where brands don't want to be in a "free"
| magazine, so the magazine has to charge a cover price, but they
| practically give away subscriptions since the cover price is
| not where they're making money.
| btown wrote:
| And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can
| still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for
| our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an
| advertisement!
|
| If anything, it's the most measurable of (non-interactive)
| video ads, since the viewer's future engagement with the
| advertised show (correcting for the baseline expected
| viewership among subscribers not shown that ad) can be
| attributed to the advertisement itself.
|
| And if retention can then be attributed to engagement,
| there's a monetary value for that ad space, which goes back
| to the grandparent post's sentiment: "someone will pay more
| to put an ad there."
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can
| still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are
| for our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an
| advertisement!
|
| I don't think I can agree with this. While I don't like
| pre-roll mini-trailers (or even full trailers), the fact
| that I've chosen to pay for the service is a pretty strong
| hint that I'd like to know what offerings they have. The
| obvious alternative is to provide me with good discovery
| tools so that I never miss anything myself. I prefer that,
| but I don't think that the pre-rolls really violate a "no
| advertising" model.
|
| It's certainly better than NPR/PBS's interpretation of "no
| advertising", which I was told in the 90s is essentially
| just "no quality adjectives".
| AJ007 wrote:
| What you see over time is that as products mature, they
| add advertising and then saturate it. The reason is
| filling your product with ads kills retention, so you
| can't do this early on.
|
| The interesting part to this is that once the competition
| is heavily saturated with ads, having no ads gives you a
| distinctive edge over them.
|
| The thing that interests me the most is how ads can
| significantly degrade the quality of the product itself.
| This is really apparent with Amazon, where their ad
| platform not only pushed up the visibility of very low
| quality products but also made their seller ecosystem
| dependent on them. Amazon's search results are their
| content, which are now ads. In order to outbid
| competitors, you need to increase your margins, which you
| do by selling a shittier product. I suspect we will see a
| similar thing happen to Apple's App Store over time.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to Apple's
| App Store over time.
|
| Already the terrible curation makes it hard to find any
| quality content in Apple's App Store. (I'll never
| understand why it's so hard to get a search for the exact
| name of an app to return that app first.) I shudder to
| imagine how bad it could be if they were _incentivised_
| to make it bad.
| btown wrote:
| I've always suspected, but never can confirm, that this
| incentivization is already the case: the reason why app
| search seems so bad is because revenue trumps any other
| aspect of relevance, and spammy apps generate more
| revenue out of unsuspecting users.
| JadeNB wrote:
| I thought the same as I was typing it, but I was going
| for "never attribute to malice that which can be
| adequately explained by incompetence". It wasn't that
| Apple App Store search quality gradually declined, as you
| would expect from a slide towards evil; as far as I know,
| it was terrible right out of the gate.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we
| run are for our own shows!"
|
| Preroll ads are only there because they haven't found
| advertisers willing to pay them enough yet. It does mean
| they have the infrastructure there, waiting and ready, and
| ad / data engineers getting data from ad viewership and
| rudimentary conversion numbers, which they can then use to
| sell ads.
|
| It'll be there soon.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| They're also experimenting with a free tier:
|
| https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/09/21/netflix-
| introduces-...
| slacka wrote:
| > streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call
| it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own
| shows!"
|
| At least on my services, they are just short trailers,
| never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not
| interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for
| this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are
| coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal
| metrics.
|
| Now I do object to the actual 5-10 min of ads I subjected
| to in the movie theater.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > At least on my services, they are just short trailers,
| never annoying ads like Progressive's. And if I'm not
| interested, there's always a Skip button. I'm paying for
| this service, I want to know what upcoming shows are
| coming. I don't mind if this helps with their internal
| metrics.
|
| Amazon Prime paid channel subscriptions don't let you
| skip the previews for that channel. (At least, that is
| true for Paramount+.)
| vel0city wrote:
| > This definitely happened for cable TV
|
| I keep seeing this, but in the US this isn't really true.
| Cable TV was originally sold as a way to get all the
| surrounding broadcast TV stations in to your home with near
| perfect signal quality without needing an antenna. This meant
| you would get all the ads those broadcast networks aired.
| Sure, cable networks did not inject additional ads, but there
| were still ads. It took a while before premium cable-only
| channels arrived, some of which touted being ad-free. But
| even then many of those premium channels had advertising from
| the beginning.
|
| Ads were on cable TV since the get go.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| I think you're too quick to discredit the claim, perhaps
| its not quite as strong as people make it seem but... This
| article written in 1981 from the NY times titled "Will
| Cable TV Be Invaded By Commercials" would somewhat disagree
| with you. I think makes the situation as clear to
| understand as possible:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-
| inv...
|
| People were assuming because they were paying for
| Television there would be no (or at least less) ads. The
| article then states that there was $45 million in cable
| advertising vs $11 billion in traditional. I think those
| numbers alone make it pretty clear advertising was not at
| the top of the (at the time) nascent industry's mind. And,
| while this is only a _guess_ its probably safe to assume
| the bulk of that $45 million went to at most a handful of
| "innovative" (vomits in mouth) cable companies.
| vel0city wrote:
| The first phrase in that article says "Although cable
| television was never conceived of as television without
| commercial interruption" which 100% supports my position.
| The original "cable TV" was to get all the broadcast
| channels near by in perfect quality without an antenna,
| thus having ads. There were ads on "cable TV" from the
| beginning , many consumers just assumed it wasn't there.
| It also acknowledges the rest of my point in stating
| "Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure
| from commercial interests, is attracting some attention
| as a potential vehicle for advertising." Note that
| essentially _some_ channels were paid extras which did
| not originally have ads, while other channels like CNN,
| USA, and RCTV did have ads from the get go.
|
| And yeah, advertising revenues weren't nearly as huge for
| cable networks at the beginning. The first cable networks
| started operations in the 50s, and you're sharing an
| article written in '81 pretty much showcasing that there
| were only a few cable-only TV stations at the time. At
| the beginning there were _zero_ cable-only TV stations,
| and that was how it was for about 30 years. All channels
| you got on cable were just the broadcast stations. Many
| years later they started adding cable-only stations with
| some of those stations having advertising and some of
| them without.
|
| The first real cable-only TV channel was HBO, which was
| without ads. The second real cable-only TV station was
| WTBS, which had ads (it was a nearly nation-wide
| rebroadcast of Ted Turner's broadcast TV station, so only
| semi-only-cable?) and started on cable in 1976. After
| that there was Christian Broadcasting Network which was
| ad-free. In 1979 we got Nickeloden and ESPN (ads), in
| 1980 we got CNN and USA (ads).
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2020/11/02/the-
| rise-...
| gumby wrote:
| I remember reading that article!
| lalopalota wrote:
| Ads were part of cable and satellite TV from the start, but
| they have "invaded" more recently in the menus.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I think there is confusion with the original (very large)
| satellite dish services. Those were marketed as ad-free.
| rbobby wrote:
| ... and more channels.
|
| In the dawn of time, also known as my childhood, there were
| 2 channels. Then 3. TV's had dials and it was my job, like
| so many other youngest children, to turn them. Then cable
| came and there were a lot of channels. So many channels you
| needed the newspaper's TV schedule to figure out what to
| watch. No more flipping between 2 or 3 channels hoping for
| something better. Planned viewing had arrived. No more
| sitting by the TV, spinning through channels, and getting
| clouted for spinning to fast because you'll break it! And
| finally, freeing children everywhere from the tyranny of
| the dial, remote control! No longer chained to the TV,
| children could return to lounging on the comfy family room
| chesterfields.
|
| Never forget that cable, and the TV remotes it spawned,
| freed millions of children from spinning TV dials!
| croutonwagon wrote:
| I remember when we got a fancy TV with
| a...wired...remote.
|
| It was amazing.
|
| Of course the wire was about 2 feet too short. So it was
| still my job to sit on the floor and in the middle of the
| room to be the "wireless" portion of the remote. But
| still, was so much better than having to walk up every 5
| minutes (my dad loved making me flip channels during
| commercials, even though often commercials were often
| synced between abc, nbc, and cbs). But then came PBS
| rbobby wrote:
| > So it was still my job to sit on the floor and in the
| middle of the room to be the "wireless" portion of the
| remote
|
| Those were the days
|
| (the archie bunker theme)
|
| :)
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| And it didn't happen with Netflix.
|
| There's a market for subscriptions. Unfortunately you have to
| provide a really fucking great product. And most of these
| companies don't.
| dangoor wrote:
| There are some for whom the paid tier _is_ "get rid of ads".
| YouTube, Spotify.
| dboreham wrote:
| Hulu has ads in the "no ads" service too.
| dangoor wrote:
| That's obnoxious
| patates wrote:
| In YT videos will still have "sponsored content" regardless.
| If they can't make YT display their ads, they will buy off
| the content creators. Ad industry is just so infectious.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| SponsorBlock
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Doesn't work on a phone or Chromecast, unfortunately.
| patates wrote:
| It's also known that the extensions are also bought and
| start displaying ads, or worse, double charge the ad
| industry to let them escape their block (like once upon a
| time ABP did).
| pushrax wrote:
| That has happened before, but very rarely, and I highly
| doubt will ever happen to SponsorBlock.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > That has happened before, but very rarely, and I highly
| doubt will ever happen to SponsorBlock.
|
| Why do you doubt it? I've read that extension creators
| are constantly bombarded with offers to package just a
| little malware in their extension; surely the same is
| true of ads. If you're just a hobbyist developer--and
| that's where the best extensions come from--surely it's
| too much to expect that you'll resist that pressure
| forever.
| darwinwhy wrote:
| SponsorBlock is open source.
| https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock
| ajayyy wrote:
| SponsorBlock is completely tied to my real identity, why
| would I want to destroy my reputation for relatively
| little gain.
| JadeNB wrote:
| It's definitely nothing against you; indeed, I thank you
| and everyone like you who makes these tools that make my
| browsing experience so much better.
|
| I assume that everyone who makes useful extensions like
| this does so out of good will. But I _also_ assume that
| it is possible for a good person to tire of maintaining a
| piece of software, and want to pass on control, and to
| allow themselves to see the upside of an appealing and
| lucrative offer and believe that the worst won 't come.
| And I can't blame a person who does this--they certainly
| don't owe _me_ anything.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| It's a great solution, but it has a big limitation: you
| can't use it with the official YouTube apps for phones
| and TV's. You end up having to resort to 'hacked'/third-
| party clients like Vanced, with all the risks to your
| Google account that entails.
| njovin wrote:
| Even the Spotify paid tier has ads in podcasts. There's no
| escape.
| lovestory wrote:
| That's not Spotify's fault. The ads are added by podcast
| host as a part of the show itself. You will have ads
| regardless of where you listen to your podcasts.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Aren't those native ads though? Or is Spotify making money
| off them too?
| tomerv wrote:
| They are, and I think that Spotify should work to ban
| them. If I'm listening to a podcast on Spotify, then
| presumably the podcast creator is already getting my
| money (indirectly, via Spotify) and therefore I should
| get an ad-free version.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| This gets to a question of what's an ad. Take EDM DJs.
| Could they advertise an upcoming festival they're playing
| at, even though the main purpose of the podcast is
| playing music?
| efaref wrote:
| > Could they *advertise* an upcoming festival
|
| Yeah, that's an ad. It's even in the sentence.
| njovin wrote:
| Spotify allows it, I've contacted their support team
| about it. They claim that as long as the creator is the
| one inserting the ads that they allow it.
| deberon wrote:
| It's a mix. As a premium spotify customer, I still see
| spotify-injected (skippable) ads.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Really? Not me.
|
| I've seen opportunities to subscribe to podcasts for $$,
| which irritated me, but that's it.
| charles_f wrote:
| Never encountered these, what were you listening to?
| njovin wrote:
| Same here. Spotify claims it's the podcast producers'
| doing when ads are inserted this way. It still miffs me.
| One of the conditions of being a paid content provider
| for Spotify should be that you provide an ad-free
| experience for premium subscribers.
| Cipater wrote:
| This can't be right.
| adrian_mrd wrote:
| native ads - kind of sums up the ludicrousness of the
| adtech industry... "they are not real ads because they
| are NATIVE!"
| version_five wrote:
| It also has constant ads for podcasts in the app, as well
| as modal popups for things it wants to promote, like new
| albums and concerts. They are definitely violating the
| spirit of "no ads"
| jefftk wrote:
| YouTube as well, if you're counting creators taking money
| to promote things.
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| + product placement in shows and films,
|
| + selling information gleaned from consumption habits (e.g.
| song choice on Spotify, etc.)
|
| Don't necessarily have to target on the platform itself.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This is exactly why regulation is needed - not to ban ads, but
| to curtail the noxious effects of them (privacy invasion, lack
| of liability for malicious ads) to tip the balance back the
| other way.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Adverts for Google Meet?
| seaman1921 wrote:
| Back to Google Meet then.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| Google Meet fails at about 15 users. Zoom can handle hundreds.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I'm curious, what are you doing that requires supporting
| hundreds of active participants (as opposed to a few active
| participants, plus a hundreds of spectators)?
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| Will the free tier still be limited to 40 minutes with ads?
| jeffwask wrote:
| Are they also removing the 40 minute free tier time limit?
| jvanveen wrote:
| In case anyone is looking for an alternative to hosted services
| like Zoom/Teams: https://github.com/garage44/pyrite is an open-
| source Vue frontend for The Galene videoconference
| server(Pion/Golang).
| m0zg wrote:
| Zoom is just dumb. A year and a half of _everyone in the world_
| using it and they couldn't even improve UX or introduce "raised
| hand" gesture or spatial audio so people wouldn't have to talk
| over one another, or even improve audio/video quality.
|
| OTOH I feel like Slack used the opportunity well. Huddle is a
| very "astute" product decision.
|
| Google Hangouts (or whatever it's called after their rebranding
| every 6 months) has improved leaps and bounds.
|
| MS videoconferencing is the same as zoom - barely usable garbage.
|
| Where's all the "innovation" all these companies constantly talk
| about? I want products that people use because they like them,
| not because they have to.
| jmacd wrote:
| I highly doubt that any free tier user will care. You have to
| wonder why they would make this a news item however, other than
| to court potential advertisers?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Boosting stock performance. It's been dropping for a year now,
| after a big COVID run-up.
| pmarcelll wrote:
| > There is one thing we want to make very clear: as noted in our
| Privacy Statement, we will not use meeting, webinar, or messaging
| content (specifically, audio, video, files, and messages) for any
| marketing, promotions, or third-party advertising purposes.
|
| Maybe the most important sentence in the whole announcement.
| mdoms wrote:
| As we know from multiple experiences, what Zoom says about
| privacy and the reality of it are very much separate.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| For now.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Honestly, privacy policies from ad supported companies are
| worthless. The pressure to break them and share that info is
| so great that I suspect most just quietly give in to it.
| tantalor wrote:
| Meaning everything else is on the table:
|
| - names of participants, and their ad profiles
|
| - meeting title, time, length
|
| Now you are getting ads for dogfood because your coworker has a
| new pet.
| _jal wrote:
| > Now you are getting ads for dogfood because your coworker
| has a new pet
|
| Or ads targeting key messages right before your team meets
| with a new vendor.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| or because the meeting was titled "Senior Dev Weekly:
| Should we eat our own dogfood?"
| soheil wrote:
| What if you and everyone replying here get a paid version or
| just use Google Meet?
|
| I don't understand why all the negativity comes out when a
| company decides to stop subsidizing all the engineering,
| bandwidth, storage, servers, .. costs that goes into a
| product.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Whereby is still add-free. For the moment.
|
| I'm surprised there aren't more very easy open-source
| alternatives than https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ , given WebRTC is
| peer-to-peer and doesn't consume bandwidth from the hosting
| service.
| yorwba wrote:
| It stops being peer-to-peer as soon as there are more than two
| participants (i.e more than one destination for the stream).
| Jitsi uses their Videobridge https://jitsi.org/jitsi-
| videobridge/ as a central server to do the multiplexing.
| coder1001 wrote:
| A deal with Admob or another ad provider will mean they make pure
| profit (no bandwidth cost) on all free users!
|
| Imagine all those bored users in forced meetings! They would
| click on anything to kill the boredom! :p
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Better, when you click, it triggers a game to kill time. But
| the game engages you with the product.
|
| Evil genius.
| coder1001 wrote:
| you are on to something!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There have been meetings where I would happily click though a
| slide deck of ads.
| awestroke wrote:
| When you put it like that, it's genius
| cletus wrote:
| At sufficient scale anything free ceases to be so and anything
| cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to
| bandwidth. I assume either the free tier was starting to get
| significantly expensive or it was simply so large that the
| potential ad revenue was too large a carrot to ignore. I can't
| say which.
|
| But I feel like Zoom is missing an opportunity here. I just went
| through the exercise of googling "zoom pricing" and... I'm
| confused. I still don't know how much it costs.
|
| Twitch can largely be credited with the model of supporting
| creators with monthly subscriptions. Obviously they didn't invent
| the monthly subscription but they made it "mainstream" (within
| the context of Twitch viewers) such that many creators can
| support themselves this way with audience sizes that aren't large
| enough to be supported by ad revenue.
|
| The point is that Twitch created a user behaviour of supporting
| creators with sufficient scale to matter.
|
| So with Zoom, the pricing should be transparent and obvious.
| Obviously you're going to have the company plans that cover all
| participants. It probably shouldn't be "unlimited" as those are
| your most valuable customers and the most willing to pay.
|
| But the missed opportunity here is to incentivize individuals to
| pay with features that might matter to them. I'm not sure what
| those are but in the very least, paid users should receive no
| ads. Make this $5/month. Lots of people will pay that if you toss
| in a few premium features.
|
| Ad-supporting free services is so pervasive because it's
| effective but it's also lazy. With the rise of remote work, there
| are a lot of people who will gladly pay some small monthly fee to
| make their life easier even if their employer won't. Build user
| behaviour.
| leodriesch wrote:
| Not sure if you would get many personal users to pay when there
| is Meet, Teams, Discord and FaceTime. IIRC they all don't have
| ads.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| > ... or it was simply so large that the potential ad revenue
| was too large a carrot to ignore.
|
| I'm always inclined to think this is the case. Investors are
| always wanting to know how you're going to increase returns
| THIS quarter.
| the_other wrote:
| Knee jerk reaction here because I'm a layperson in this area...
|
| > anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly
| applies to bandwidth.
|
| This breaks the basic supply-demand rule. It's also happening
| more often. Why are our business models so messed uo?
| nemothekid wrote:
| When it comes to bandwidth, supply is largely fixed and the
| suppliers (ISPs, AWS) are corrupt or would rather just
| collect rents. It's incredibly difficult for a new company to
| make inroads as well (even for a company like Google, which
| seems to have paused its Google Fiber rollout)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Each unit of bandwidth is probably getting cheaper, but if
| you end up giving away a ton of it, it is still a massive
| expense.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Modern advertising enable predatory pricing without
| significant (or any) financial cost to the predator. There
| are fewer (or no) protections against predatory pricing in
| most markets because classical economics assumed that
| businesses would fail if they deprived themselves of revenue.
| That is no longer the case.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They could always work on making the system peer-to-peer. You
| will never get 100% of the way there because of some overly
| restrictive networks, but you can get the majority of users
| (especially those on home connections without enterprise
| firewalls/etc) to connect directly making it sustainable enough
| (the last 10% can just be subsidized by paying users and/or by
| ads - it could literally be a "fix your network for P2P to
| work, or watch ads to pay for TURN relays).
| jhugo wrote:
| P2P multiparty videoconferencing just isn't realistic outside
| of tech demos. In a call of 20 participants, someone with a
| typical 720p webcam would be transmitting more than 50Mbit/s,
| which doesn't sound like a lot when ISPs market so-called
| "1Gbit fibre", but in fact is more than a lot of residential
| connections and home Wi-Fi can reliably push without
| unacceptable loss/delay/jitter.
|
| A product built with this architecture could not deliver the
| reliability and performance that Zoom delivers with the
| variety of connectivity quality that its users have.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I wonder if WebRTC will ever support Multicast IP (or maybe
| explicit multi-unicast) so that you only need to upload one
| copy of your signal.
|
| Something tells me the various consumer routers out there
| wouldn't know how to deal with the traffic...
| detaro wrote:
| consumer routers are not the main problem with that (they
| might even support multicast, because various ISPs use it
| to distribute TV channels) - the public internet
| generally has no way of handling it.
| toast0 wrote:
| WebRTC can support it all they want, but to a first
| approximation, Multicast doesn't work over the open
| internet, so it won't help outside of corporate
| videoconference (which generally runs OK, because
| corporate networks are mostly wired and often
| overprovisioned or easier to provision than homes)
| wanderingshi wrote:
| do we not remember the disaster that was p2p skype
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| If you're not a customer, you're the product.
| rexreed wrote:
| This is the one and only answer ;) Of course the alternative to
| making free customers the product is to upsell free customers
| to a paid plan and factor in the conversion rate when using
| free as a marketing method. But if the free product is "good
| enough" then there are few upsells (which I believe is Zoom's
| problem), and then it's back to the user is the product not the
| customer.
| npteljes wrote:
| This is a tired cliche. Users are products either way.
| jen20 wrote:
| And it seems irresistible to many companies to make paying
| customers the product too.
| personjerry wrote:
| After the video call seems fine to me.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| "Okay, thanks, bye"
|
| killall -9 zoom
| EMM_386 wrote:
| This is only on a web page shown after the meeting has ended, not
| part of the video software itself.
|
| I don't see what the big deal is.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| FOR NOW
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Imagine about to do a meeting, 30 second commercial comes on
| about some restaurant, well let's go get food.
|
| Side note, at least now it's easy to make your own video
| setup, providers like Twilio/OpenTok, so... pay or set it
| up/pay yourself idk.
|
| I get it though, it's like YouTube vs. Vimeo... costs money
| to facilitate that magic that just works/have the audience.
| btbuildem wrote:
| For now.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I'm imagining a future update that increases their ad revenue
| by 10% due to a bug that randomly ends calls prematurely,
| thus creating more ad views.
|
| Later on, a precocious junior engineer discovers the bug, but
| isn't allowed to fix it due to the revenue hit.
| zippergz wrote:
| Exactly. Once they get that first hit of sweet, sweet ad
| revenue, there will inevitably be pressure to grow it, and
| then grow it faster. Zoom does not strike me as the kind of
| company that will be able to resist the temptation to insert
| ever more obnoxious ads, as long as it leads to revenue
| growth. (That said, they don't have to support a free tier at
| all, and it's not free to run, so I don't completely begrudge
| them looking for ways to monetize it beyond just Pro
| upgrades).
| pornel wrote:
| Unless it's an open-source/self-hosted application, you're
| always at mercy of code owners.
| godshatter wrote:
| One that already shows up in a browser a few minutes into the
| meeting, even though I used the native app to connect to it. I
| consider it an ad for the program I'm already using, which is
| just bonkers, so I close it reflexively. I'm using the paid
| version, but if I weren't I would still close it as soon as I
| see it, so the ad would be wasted on me.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I dont see how you could not see that Ads are consuming every
| facet of our lives.
| hawski wrote:
| I imagine it will become a good malware vector.
| davidatbu wrote:
| I don't understand how.
|
| It is an ad on a page in the browser. Don't many other
| companies (Google, Facebook, etc) manage to do that without
| becoming vectors for malware?
| hawski wrote:
| I think it is a bit different when it will be seen by
| employees as a part of internal tooling. After the meeting
| they see a banner "Important points from the presentation"
| or "The mandatory new tool to fight malware." or even
| "2021-11-sales.xls" and I guarantee people will click on
| it. Of course you can blame it on companies saving money
| for more or less sensible reasons by not paying for their
| tools and on uneducated employees, but it will happen.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Don't many other companies (Google, Facebook, etc) manage
| to do that without becoming vectors for malware?
|
| This all depends on targeting (as an HN user you're
| unlikely to be targeted by them as there are higher-value
| ads that match your profile) but at the bottom of the
| targeting barrel there are absolutely ads for scams and/or
| malware.
| npteljes wrote:
| They manage, but they're not bulletproof. One such
| instance:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2016/11/googl...
| expicli wrote:
| It matters because kids use this software. Who knows what will
| pop up
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Protecting the kid against immoral or chocking things is a,
| IMO, not as important as not exposing them to constant brain
| washing from ads.
|
| If I have to chose between naked people and a coke ad, I'd
| rather have the kids see sex. Honestly, the former never had
| a negative impact on me, but the later really had.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| Sex is one thing, but porn isn't sex.
|
| It's like comparing coffee and meth.
| vlunkr wrote:
| This is the kind of absolutely unreasonable opinion that
| could only gain traction on the internet.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| What about a naked couple enjoying a coke after sex?
|
| Does that work?
| gidorah wrote:
| Tbh, better to have the Coke beforehand.
| pg5 wrote:
| I can't blame them, considering how high bandwidth costs are for
| video.
| bryans wrote:
| According to Zoom, they annually host approximately 3.5
| trillion minutes of video at 1.2Mbps. That's about $100 million
| worth of bandwidth for a company that generates $4 billion in
| revenue. And a portion of those hosted minutes are actually
| peer-to-peer and not going through their servers.
| queuebert wrote:
| Yeah sure, but have quarterly revenues gone up? /s
| AlexAltea wrote:
| I can't blame them either... but isn't high bandwidth usage a
| solvable problem?
|
| Why can't they switch to P2P audio/video transmission instead
| of funneling everything through their servers?
| stevewodil wrote:
| Because P2P doesn't scale well when you have tens or hundreds
| of people transmitting video and consuming the video on
| different devices (mobile vs desktop) across different
| regions. You can't guarantee the experience is good when you
| don't control the distribution. Also P2P had potential to
| expose user IP's
| Cort3z wrote:
| The key issue with P2P is that you have many more total
| connections in the system, so the service itself usually
| takes a hit. You get N^2 in stead of N streams. You can also
| easier optimize the video quality per peer with a centralized
| system, possibly saving even further amounts of streams,
| because (as an example) you don't have to send out a 120p +
| 240p + 480p + 720p and so on, you only need to send one 720p
| stream, however this could conceivably be solved by smart
| compression. With p2p you would have to send the same stream
| to all participants. It becomes impractical very fast, and
| the quality of the service goes down quickly.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You do get worse latency though, right? Which I believe to
| be important for conversation quality, even when users
| don't actively realize that latency is to blame.
|
| I've always felt that Skype calls became much worse once
| Microsoft bought them and shifted away from p2p.
| toast0 wrote:
| > You do get worse latency though, right? Which I believe
| to be important for conversation quality, even when users
| don't actively realize that latency is to blame.
|
| Latency in voice communication is super important, yes.
|
| P2P latency can be better or worse than P2S2P latency. It
| depends on the networks the peers and server are on,
| where all parties are located, and how they're
| interconnected.
|
| If the peers are on the same ISP, P2P is probably better,
| if they're not, it can vary widely. Sometimes those ISP
| will exchange packets directly, but far away, whereas
| they both may have more direct routes to a nearby server.
| If the peers are far away, the server network may have
| better long distance transit than the peer ISPs. Of
| course, sometimes the server is far away from both the
| peers. For some participants, p2p brings problems because
| it exposes each peer's IP to the other peers.
|
| A well designed system will measure and adjust the
| routing for the best results, including during the call
| (and carefully adjust the buffering to avoid large
| jitter) as conditions can change.
| ryanianian wrote:
| I'd say 50% or more of my zoom calls involve 2 or fewer
| other people all on decent (>20mbps) connections. P2P seems
| viable for a large chunk of the usage where N is small.
| jhugo wrote:
| You might be surprised how little of the "sticker
| bandwidth" on a residential connection you can actually
| use when you are sending UDP at a highish packet rate,
| perhaps to an international destination, and need low
| loss+latency+jitter.
|
| The average experience of users would go down
| significantly as you start to multiply the bandwidth
| requirements, which is why P2P isn't typically used for
| more than 2 participants despite the potential bandwidth
| savings to the operator.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I suspect the support costs and adoption friction for
| bypassing all possible consumer NAT devices would be high.
| (No one wants to get the reputation as "oh, that video conf
| software fails to work a lot".)
|
| I suppose "try the P2P method and fallback
| automatically/invisibly to server-connected if that fails"
| could work pretty well though.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Doesn't STUN/TURN effectively deal with the NAT problem
| nowadays, or is there more to it than that?
| jhugo wrote:
| When you can't establish a direct connection (potentially
| with the help of STUN), you need to use TURN, which uses
| a server as a relay, so it's not really P2P any more
| (although a TURN server does less work than an SFU, so
| you can scale it up more cheaply).
| iso1631 wrote:
| > (No one wants to get the reputation as "oh, that video
| conf software fails to work a lot".)
|
| Webex seem happy
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Peer to Peer WebRTC with https://meet.jit.si/ should get a bit
| busier now!
| jhugo wrote:
| Jitsi Meet (in common with other WebRTC videoconferencing
| systems in common use) is only P2P when there are exactly 2
| people in the meeting. (And even then it may need to use a
| server depending on the type of connectivity you have.)
|
| P2P videoconferencing beyond a few participants isn't very
| practical in the real world, due to the bandwidth requirements
| rapidly exceeding what a typical user's connection can reliably
| transmit without unacceptable loss/delay/jitter.
| manquer wrote:
| Jitsi or any other p2p system is limited when more than 2
| people are connected in the same room.
| cphoover wrote:
| I don't care as long as they don't track me. (They probably will)
| justinc8687 wrote:
| Given, that unlike many advertising supported services, you can
| pay Zoom and remove ads, I fail to see a problem with this.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Given, that unlike many advertising supported services, you
| can pay Zoom and remove ads
|
| If you are an enterprise, yes. For individual usage - like, for
| example, hosting a virtual beer night with friends - you have
| to go for a subscription that you have to take care to cancel
| afterwards.
| akudha wrote:
| It would be nice to have some laws around subscription
| services. Something along the lines of
|
| 1. Services have to inform the user (text, email...) every
| time they charge their card. Even better would be to inform
| 48 hours before, so users have a chance to cancel.
|
| 2. Any subscription service should provide the user to choose
| the duration, when they sign up. If I need LinkedIn
| subscription for 3 months, then I should be able to choose at
| the time of subscription, and it should be canceled
| automatically after three monthly payments.
|
| And so on. These are all trivial to implement tech wise.
|
| But hey, who am I kidding. These are never going to happen
| lupire wrote:
| You can cancel Zoom whenever you want (effective end of
| current term, do you can cancel 5 minutes after signup),
| and get a refund for unused past subscription
|
| https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-
| us/articles/203634215-Cancelin...
| searchableguy wrote:
| That is the case in India enforced by RBI guidelines.
|
| https://rbi.org.in//Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=11668
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Watching this rule come into force has been weird and
| enlightening in many ways. For one, this rule caused a
| lot of friction as many banks and payment processing
| systems weren't ready for it by the time it came into
| force. This despite it being announced over two years
| before it came into effect _and_ a 6-month extension on
| the enforcement date! Also, while I personally like the
| new rules and support them wholeheartedly, there's been
| significant opposition to them because they make it more
| onerous for businesses to set up subscriptions, an
| already rare and difficult business model in India.
| Personally, if your business mode counts on people so
| passively continuing to subscribe that they can't re-
| authenticate every payment cycle (and that too only if
| it's a significant amount per month!) I think you you
| should rethink what you do, but what do I know?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > For one, this rule caused a lot of friction as many
| banks and payment processing systems weren't ready for it
| by the time it came into force. This despite it being
| announced over two years before it came into effect and a
| 6-month extension on the enforcement date!
|
| Probably they hoped that the law got overturned by a
| change of government or because of lobbying/bribery...
| why invest in change when there's still a possibility of
| it being unneeded?
| d3nj4l wrote:
| A change in Government isn't due for at least three more
| years - and even then, it's unlikely, as the ruling party
| hasn't really lost their popularity. I think you're right
| in that they were hoping for changes, but maybe through
| an internal process or something like that which didn't
| work out as expected.
| ls65536 wrote:
| And cancelling any such service should be required to be no
| more difficult than signing up for it was. For example, if
| you can sign up online with a simple form and a button
| click, you should be able to cancel online with a simple
| form and a button click.
| crate_barre wrote:
| It's the same as seeing ads on a chat platform. Why bother?
| There are plenty of alternatives with no ads. Developers won't
| fall for this, but I guess your local church group won't know
| any better.
| ryanianian wrote:
| Are there actually viable alternatives with similar quality
| and latency factors to Zoom?
|
| Last I checked, the competitors, whether free or not, all had
| meaningful downsides (quality, latency, self-hosted,
| inextricably bundled to another system, etc) with the only
| upside being "it's not Zoom."
|
| Honest question. I'm sure the land has changed a lot in the
| last 6-12 months.
| johnsoft wrote:
| I'm a happy Discord user. I'm sure now someone will list
| all the downsides of Discord (proprietary, target
| demographic, etc) but I'm just answering the question as
| asked.
| crate_barre wrote:
| I haven't had too many issues with Google Meet, for
| example.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I've had positive experiences with both Microsoft Teams
| (Skype) video and with Google Meet in the last 6 months. In
| terms of "stands alone easily," Google Meet has a pretty
| great experience for the casual user, although it does have
| some confusingly implemented UX (for screen-sharing,
| admitting-users, etc). The UX is easy for tech-oriented
| folks but your grandma might need some training.
|
| The one I was kinda surprised wasn't any good, even for
| audio-only, was Discord. Not that it fits your criteria
| anyway.
|
| n of 1 and all that, I don't have any supporting data.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I don't believe anyone is a casual user of video chat
| anymore. It's like calling someone a casual telephone
| user or a casual car user. It's fundamental to daily
| life.
| ausername42027 wrote:
| You are majorly in a tech (a.k.a HN) bubble if you think
| that. People whose jobs have been 100% in person the
| entire pandemic are not using video chat for work, so
| that leaves family and friends. Many people just talk on
| the phone or see people in person.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I disagree, on video chat, telephone, AND car usage. Some
| folks (often (although certainly not always) older with a
| lower tolerance for UI changes) just don't use them very
| often.
|
| My mother, for example, still prefers correspondence via
| snail mail. She has learned to tolerate FaceTime, but
| Zoom is always a bit of a hassle and requires a separate
| phone-call to her landline to help her walk through the
| steps to get connected. I don't think she's unusual. It's
| a big world, with lots of kinds of people in it.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| "Infrequent" is not the same as "casual." If anything
| it's the reverse because you avoid using it unless it is
| literally a matter of life or death.
| [deleted]
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Are there actually viable alternatives with similar
| quality and latency factors to Zoom?
|
| Yes. Google Meet is just as easy to use, and Jitsi is even
| easier with zero signup required.
| papito wrote:
| "Are you sick of your boss? CLICK HERE"
| thih9 wrote:
| When I read the title, I thought about ads being shown during
| calls. Looks like this is about ads on the final browser screen
| only:
|
| > For this initial program, ads will be rolled out only on the
| browser page users see once they end their meeting. Only free
| Basic users in certain countries will see these ads if they join
| meetings that are hosted by other free Basic users.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| "We heard you were talking about deliveries on your Zoom call.
| Try USP for fast deliveries, 10% off if you click here
| nowwwww!".
| dannyw wrote:
| I have a feeling that this is probably more of an upgrade call to
| action, and they probably don't expect material revenue from ads.
|
| Even at $5 CPM (high for a web banner), zoom will make... half a
| penny per meeting, before incurring multiple cents in bandwidth
| costs.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The ad can be a silent video ad permanantly playing at the side
| of the screen. One ad every 30 seconds should become quite a
| lot of ad views by the end of a long meeting.
| kortex wrote:
| Oh great, that's exactly what we need for meeting engagement
| and zoom fatigue: distracting sidebar ads.
|
| Maybe it will encourage people to giddy up and finish just to
| get away from the ads.
| koolba wrote:
| It'll be more than $5 CPM for an ad where you know the
| consumer:
|
| - Has their audio enabled and speakers on
|
| - Has personalized data and history associated with their
| account
|
| - Has a camera aimed at them to detect eyeball ad tracking
| geocar wrote:
| > Even at $5 CPM (high for a web banner), zoom will make...
| half a penny per meeting, before incurring multiple cents in
| bandwidth costs.
|
| Zoom says they have over 3.3 trillion meeting-minutes as of
| October 2020: Let's assume they are counting each party to the
| meeting separately, and that "free tier" represents a mere 10%
| of their traffic: A $1 CPM rotated every five minutes is $660m
| every year.
|
| Ad serving (technology) is cheap if done smartly: I could serve
| a billion video ads a month for around $150k/pcm in 2013.
|
| I would expect not only material revenue, but material growth
| as well.
| pram wrote:
| Have ads (preferably animated) as the virtual background of all
| the meeting participants. If their camera isn't on, then have a
| Memoji fill-in sitting in a virtual ad-world. True innovation!
| [deleted]
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| For additional dystopian vibes, add the advertisement in the
| others voice- while synthesizing neural net face video..
|
| Your coworkers and customers and boss are loving it..
| einpoklum wrote:
| Readers should be reminded that Zoom also censors some Zoom
| meetings, preventing them from being held. This may not be very
| wide-spread, but it does happen:
|
| * Panel discussion with Palestinian activist Leyla Khaled:
| https://theintercept.com/2020/11/14/zoom-censorship-leila-kh...
|
| ( and see also
| https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/10/27/zoom-fa... )
|
| * Chinese opposition activists censored at the behest of China:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23498664
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Anything that competes with the advertising oligopoly is good.
| mattl wrote:
| What is Zoom Video?
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| That didn't take long.
| bborud wrote:
| Use http://whereby.com instead. Reasonable people that make a
| markedly unfussy product.
|
| (Full disclosure: I know the founders)
| joosters wrote:
| Looks like HN comments have ads too...
| bborud wrote:
| Make something cool and I'll shill for you :)
| blowski wrote:
| I've been using Whereby for the last couple of years, and I do
| like it. It works well for small calls, but for calls with more
| than 5 people I found that it started to use a lot of CPU. If
| you're smaller than that, it's actually one of the most
| frictionless videoconference tools around.
| lvl100 wrote:
| People still use Zoom? Didn't they hype up some productivity
| suite at the height of the pandemic to attract more investment
| money? Is Zoom management another scam management? One trick
| pony?
| protomyth wrote:
| Every government and school meeting I've had to attend over the
| last two years is on Zoom. We tried to go with someone else but
| peer pressure made us get a contract with Zoom for all classes.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Zoom UI & UX remains atrocious, I don't understand why they
| got that much traction.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Really? It works well for me. I've never had a problem
| participating in a Zoom meeting.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's really good at one thing, which is getting people into
| calls in the Zoom client quickly and painlessly, no matter
| what device they're on. And, those calls have much better
| quality than any in-browser solution I've tried (e.g.
| Google Meet).
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| And unlike Google Meet or MS Teams, it doesn't cause my
| Macbook's fans to spin into orbit.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| I agree. Also, those who claim it's more reliable than
| alternatives seem to have no qualms installing a native
| app. Like-for-like comparison with browser-based
| alternatives doesn't perform favorably.
| corpdronejuly wrote:
| I teach on zoom every week, and the UI is head and
| shoulders above every other competitor for screen share and
| annotation.
|
| Google meet, and jitsi meet are both depressingly bad for
| this use case.
| Peritract wrote:
| Agreed; I also teach virtually, across a number of
| platforms, and Zoom is the one that just works easily and
| intuitively for everyone. Screen sharing and breakout
| rooms are a pain in all the other tools I've tried.
|
| It's not my favourite piece of software, but for virtual
| teaching, it is head-and-shoulders above the competition.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I also taught on zoom -when I had connection issues I had
| no idea how to reconnect to a dropped call. Meanwhile
| students where thrown out of the call when I took to
| long.
|
| Compared to google meet it all felt like a bad joke.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The video and audio quality is still more reliable than
| anything else I've tried. In the sense of not "breaking
| up"; not that it's actually high-res audio or video. It's
| the only one where regardless of participants network or
| machine quality, the conversation hardly ever gets
| interrupted.
|
| It also still can show more simultaneous "squares" of video
| than most (maybe not all anymore) of it's competitors.
|
| Also it's atrocious UI and UX may still be better than MS
| Teams.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Interesting contrarian opinion. I have literally never met
| a person who thought this, and I have managed Zoom
| migrations for multiple companies
| vultour wrote:
| Agree, recently changed jobs and went from Zoom to Teams
| and it's a complete dumpster fire. Never had a single
| issue with Zoom.
| mattl wrote:
| It's cross platform and not owned by a FAANG company
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| How much work would it be to write an open source alternative to
| Zoom?
|
| And another question:
|
| Since most users nowadays sit behind a router that only allows
| outbound connections - how do Zoom users connect to each other?
| dijit wrote:
| Right now? Nothing, jitsi meet exists.
|
| https://meet.jit.si
|
| https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I've been trying to get so many of my friends/family to use
| Jitsi instead of Zoom throughout the pandemic. Usually the
| response is, "Oh this is great!" And then they're back to
| using Zoom the next day because they're used to hearing
| "zoom" as a verb. Zoom did an incredible job marketing itself
| into a trend.
| [deleted]
| dboreham wrote:
| WebRTC with NAT traversal is a mature technology now. The
| problems are a) making the client ultra-reliable and just work
| for regular users (Zoom's main USP imho), and b) someone needs
| to host the service for rendezvous/signaling, and to TUN the
| long tail of nodes for which NAT traversal doesn't work. There
| is no true P2P on today's NAT'ed Internet.
| jhugo wrote:
| > and to TUN the long tail of nodes for which NAT traversal
| doesn't work. There is no true P2P on today's NAT'ed
| Internet.
|
| The bigger problem, which affects all nodes even if they can
| establish direct connectivity, is just the bandwidth
| requirements of true P2P videoconferencing once you have more
| than a few participants in the meeting. People often find out
| that even a connection marketed as "1Gbit fibre" likely has
| unacceptable loss/delay/jitter once they try to transmit,
| say, 50Mbit/s of UDP at a high packet rate to a variety of
| international destinations at the same time.
| evancoop wrote:
| While ads are frustrating, isn't the pervasive nature of
| surveillance capitalism worse? Would we rather pay some small
| amounts for the digital products we use, watch a handful of ads,
| or handover the totality of our thoughts, intentions, and
| behavior to the provider?
|
| Seems like our grandparents were correct. Nothing is free.
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