Facebook Messenger adds free movie calling to take on Skype – The Edge
Facebook Messenger adds free movie calling to take on Skype
Facebook is rolling out movie calling to Messenger today, letting users talk face to face with their friends by tapping a single button inwards the app. The free feature, which works over both LTE and Wi-Fi, competes with similar products including Microsoft’s Skype, Google Hangouts, and Apple’s FaceTime. It’s meant for the average user, but should also prove useful to Facebook as it resumes developing its Facebook for Work service.
From a product standpoint, there isn’t much to say about movie calling in Messenger. From any of your talks, you simply tap the movie camera icon to commence a call. Once the call has embarked, you can switch back and forward from the front-facing and rear cameras, or turn your camera off entirely. Stan Chudnovsky, Messenger’s head of product, says Facebook’s developers focused on making movie work well even on relatively low-bandwith cell networks. In a demonstration, call quality was good even inwards a building where we only had two bars of connectivity on LTE.
Keeping Facebook at the center of its users’ communication habits
Movie calling should help Messenger build on its considerable momentum: the product now has more than six hundred million monthly active users, and they’re making ten percent of all internet-based phone calls. While Facebook doesn’t profit from the calls, they keep the company at the center of its users’ communication habits. In a related stir, last week Facebook introduced Hello, an Android dialer and contacts manager that promotes using Facebook for more calls. Earlier in the month, Messenger flipped out a desktop version of the service. It’s all part of an effort to turn Messenger into an Asian-style messaging platform like LINE or WeChat, which generate enormous revenues through e-commerce, gaming, and other services.
And as Facebook’s business suggesting comes into concentrate, movie could be a clever area of concentrate: I’ve infrequently met a business sated with its movie calling solution. (At The Brink we cycle hopelessly through every solution, switching whenever the service we’re using inevitably drops the call.) If Facebook Messenger movie turns out to be as good as Chudnovsky promises, it will likely appeal to enterprises.