VooV Meeting, the international version of Tencent’s cloud-based videoconferencing platform Tencent Meeting, has been launched in over 100 countries and regions as of March 20, including the US, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Thailand and Japan, as the coronavirus pandemic forces workers around the world to work from home.
The platform supports online conferences of up to 300 attendees free of charge and includes features such as online document collaboration and screen sharing.
“With the mounting number of new COVID-19 cases outside of China, we look forward to providing our users in other countries and regions with the capabilities to work remotely,” said Lori Wu, vice president of Tencent Cloud in a statement provided to KrAsia. “As we move forward, we plan to roll out the service across the world, in compliance with local regulations.”
Telecommuting services like Tencent Meeting, ByteDance’s Feishu Meeting and Alibaba’s DingTalk have become household names as China’s response to the coronavirus led to millions of people working and studying from home. Tencent Meeting and DingTalk both encountered server crashes due to the surge in demand.
While it is too early to foretell the extent that work from home platforms will be used outside of China, the opportunity for such technology appears to be widening as more and more countries enforce lockdowns and quarantine measures to stem the coronavirus outbreak.
For example, collaborative tools including Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Team have also seen downloads skyrocket over the past few weeks. Zoom gained nearly 600,000 new installs on Sunday alone according to mobile apps tracker Apptopia, its biggest day ever.