Amazon has launched a new video conferencing service called Chime. It’s basically the company’s answer to Skype for Business, WebEx, GotoMeeting, and other enterprise software that allows multiple participants to join a conference from anywhere using computers, tablets, or phones.
There are Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps for Amazon Chime, and there’s a Chime Basic service that anyone can use to make one-on-one voice or video calls or participate in a meeting hosted by someone else.
Business customers who want to hold online meetings with larger groups will have to pay.
Plans start at $2.50 per user per month and top out at $15 per user per month.
Paid accounts also offer additional features including user management tools and screen sharing.
One feature that helps set Amazon Chime apart from other video conferencing services is a visual list of participants that lets you know where background noise is coming from, and which allows each participant to mute noisy connections. In other words, you don’t need to wait for a conference moderator to mute that one person who has a TV on in the background or who has a noisy keyboard that clicks audibly as that person takes notes.
via Amazon
No Linux client (or at least web client) as a generic web conference tool? Even Jitsi seems more powerful than this and that you can take and install on your own server if you prefer.
Do we really need this when WebRTC already exists? When one can use things like appear.in to create meeting rooms on-the-fly?
I understand for large meetings but those are a mess anyway…
There is a huge market in enterprise for services like this still. We are seeing companies move away from the traditional names and into cloud services already. Most use Amazon AWS as part of their infrastructure and this appears to be a first step into taking more of that business beyond the data center. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a cloud VOIP phone system come down the road from them.