The popular video collaboration application Zoom has added a host of features, including the ability to turn off incoming video feed from other participants in a meeting. If you are using a restricted connection, this feature will help preserve bandwidth for shared content. Users can enable or disable the feature on the Zoom client for Windows and Mac, the Zoom app on iOS and Android, and the web client as well. Zoom confirmed that the iOS release requires Apple approval and may take a few additional days to appear in the App Store.
While announcing the new feature through a support post, Zoom said, “Users in a meeting can easily disable all incoming video through in-meeting controls. This may be done to preserve bandwidth for shared content or to avoid mental fatigue from viewing multiple, active video participants. The account owner and admins can enable this for use in meetings at the Account-, Group-, and User-level web settings.”
How to stop incoming video on Zoom meetings?
- Sign in to the Zoom Web portal as an admin
- Go to Account Management > Account Settings > Meeting
- Under During the meeting (Advanced), click on ‘stop incoming video‘
- Click on the verification toggle
- When the confirmation dialog is displayed, click Also, to disable confirm your changes.
Although the users will be able to stop the incoming video feeds, it is worth mentioning that the other participants in a call will remain unaffected and unaware as well.
How does it help you?
On a video conferencing application such as Zoom, a lot more is going on in the background than is actually visible to the end-user. Hence, such applications consume a larger amount of data than others do. With Zoom’s feature of disabling the incoming video feed, a user can spend or operate on less bandwidth or low speeds to view the contents of the Zoom meeting. As per the company, the feature will help users to preserve bandwidth when using Zoom on a restricted network and will also reduce mental fatigue from staring at multiple video windows of other participants in a call.
What’s more?
The US-based company has added various new features to its platform to make it more robust and a complete video conferencing tool. It has also improved other aspects of the video collaboration application such as audio and security. Both the host and the co-host of a meeting can check active security features in real-time. Zoom has also added support for rich text formatting for messages, replies, and editing messages. So, on the web and desktop client, users will now be able to use bold, italics, highlight, strikethrough, text color, underline, font size, bulleted and numbered list, hyperlinks, and indenting options.
Further, Zoom also allows users to pay for a paid service through Google Play instead of directly doing it through the application. Plus, the company also added minor UI improvements with the new update.
