Telegram has missed one of the great trends of 2020: video calls in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies like Zoom, and services like Meet or Microsoft Teams have been “born” or almost reborn thanks to telecommuting, online education or simply calls between friends and family. Telegram has not arrived on time, but just announced that finally have video calls, and they have come up with the features you would expect from such a service.
One of Zoom’s big problems has been not being able to guarantee your end-to-end encryption in his video calls, something that finally yes They have promised what they will do. Telegram video calls, meanwhile, will have end-to-end encryption, something that may come to surprise, considering that the application chats do not have it (except those that we have as secret chats). Of course, the audio calls also already had that encryption.
Group video calls, the great lack of Telegram
Telegram video calls are integrated like voice calls, which were already available on the platform. However, when it comes to video, they will work with a picture-over-picture (PiP) mode when we are inside the application and want to communicate in other chats, so that we can see the video of the other person even when we chat in group or individual chats.
Telegram will allow us to continue chatting without having the video in the foreground
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The problem with Telegram video calls is that although they come at a time when they will be very useful for more than 400 million people, at the moment users will not be able to make group video calls, so that they will not quite rival WhatsApp, which continues to be the application that makes it easier to collect video to a group of eight people.
From Telegram have promised to launch group video calls in the coming months, so we will have to wait to see what features they include and how many participants they allow per calls. At the moment, they have only announced video calls on Android and iOS, but we have already been able to test them on Windows. On the desktop, the option to video call directly does not exist, but we have to click on the audio call button, and later activate our camera once it has started.
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