With the rising demand, Facebook is upping its game and improving its video chat options.

As a result of the pandemic, tech giants like Facebook are constantly rolling out new features or improving the already existing ones. Hence, as a continuum, Facebook has decided to expand its features for video chat.

Facebook has announced the expansion of Messenger Rooms, which serves as a tool for starting virtual hangouts with friends and family. It can allow up to 50 people at a time, so they can drop in whenever they like and conduct video conferences with each other. Apart from this, the company has increased the capacity of video calls on WhatsApp as now eight people instead of four can talk through video calls.

New live-streaming features have been added to both Instagram and Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement via live stream today. He said, “Video presence isn’t a new area for us, but it’s an area that we want to go deeper in, and it fits the overall theme, which is that we’re shifting more resources in the company to focus on private communication and private social platforms, rather than just the traditional broader ones. So this is a good mix: we’re building tools into Facebook and Instagram that are helping people find smaller groups of people to then go have more intimate connections with, and be able to have private sessions with.”

Source: The Verge

Due to the Coronavirus, people all around the globe have been forced to stay indoors and rely on digital tools for almost everything. Hence, whether it is school play or office work, people have been dependent on technology and social media websites. Every day more than 700 million people make calls on Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp.

With that, the rise of Zoom and other similar apps have been witnessed. Zoom was an app designed for business conferencing that experienced a spike from 10 million users to 300 million users in a matter of three months. Houseparty is an app for virtual hangouts, and this also gained approximately 50 million users.

Facebook has always been paranoid, so of course, the rapid growth of these apps has been a major cause of concern for it. Hence, it has devoted its sleepless nights to copying features to meet the rapidly changing needs of the consumers.