The battle for video conferencing supremacy has taken another twist with a number of upgrades and improvements for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
First up, LinkedIn has revealed an upgrade to its messaging service that will allow members to carry out video calls on the site using Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans or Zoom, bringing millions more potential users to those platforms.
But there's worse news for Google Meet users, who will soon be facing restrictions on call lengths for certain editions of the service.
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LinkedIn calls
LinkedIn's announcement comes as part of a major overhaul for the business-focused social media platform, launching alongside the site's first major visual redesign in five years.
From the start of October 2020 across mobile and desktop, LinkedIn users will be able to switch their conversations from chat to face-to-face directly from LinkedIn messages.
To start, you'll just need to click on the video icon next to where you'd type a message, which will bring up a menu where you can choose from Teams, Zoom, or BlueJeans and a prompt to sign in. Users can share a unique link to start an instant meeting, or schedule for later.
Elsewhere, Google Meet users are facing a downgrade of sorts after Google announced it would be ending its gift of unlimited free calls on the service.
The company had given all users free meetings with no time limit earlier this year as the demand for video conferencing grew in the pandemic.
However from September 30, users on the Google Meet free plan will be limited to calls of just 60 minutes.
Google is also removing access to some Meet features for G Suite and G Suite for Education customers, including the ability to have meetings with up to 250 participants, broadcast livestreams of up to 100,000 people within a single domain, as well as the ability to save meeting recordings to Google Drive.
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Via The Verge
