Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., is due to appear before a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee in Washington, DC, USA, on Wednesday, October 23, 2019.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Facebook announced on Wednesday that video conferencing apps, headed by Zoom, will be coming to its Portal video cropping devices in a few weeks.
Zoom, BlueJeans, LogMeIn’s GoToMeeting and Cisco’s Webex will arrive on the Portal Mini, Portal and Portal + in September. The video calling services will arrive on Portal TV “in the future.”
The addition of these popular video conferencing apps should be a big advantage for the Portal, one of the few pieces of the social media company in hardware next to the Oculus virtual reality headsets.
Video conferencing apps have seen major upticks in use due to more people working at home as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom’s mobile app had 173 million monthly active users in May, up from as much as 14 million in March, according to app analytics firm Apptopia. Webex had more than 500 million users who generated 25 billion minutes of meetings in April, tripling its volume in February, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts during the company’s quarter for profit in May.
Facebook introduced its first Portal devices in 2018, but they initially struggled to get adoption due to privacy concerns. Portal units received some traction earlier this year, and sold online to order from house to house.
Currently, Portal can be used to make video calls via Messenger, WhatsApp and Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise communication software.
–CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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