Skype Now Allows Group Video Calls With 50 People at Once
Skype is doubling the number of people that you can call in a group at once. The company announced the new upgrade earlier this week, allowing users to make video or audio calls with up to 50 people at the same time.
The doubling of the number of people supported by group calls to 50 puts Skype ahead of most mainstream chat services, including the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. More notably, Skype is now ahead of Apple’s FaceTime, which allows users to make group calls with up to 32 people at once.
Skype is also changing the way group calls are made to make things less annoying. When you make a group call with more than 25 people, Skype will simply send a normal notification to all the members instead of ringing them all at the same time. And that will make things less annoying as everyone in the group won’t get a ring everytime you start a group call. Skype will let you individually call certain members in the group, and if your group has less than 25 participants, you can ring them at all the same time.
The experience for switching between different members in a group call still seems quite a mess, however. You will simply have a gallery of all the participants at the top of the call, and you can choose to see different members from there. Apple’s FaceTime, on the other hand, makes it so the people that are speaking at a certain time are on focus.