Moorhen Media doesn’t have a company motto. If we did, I’d like to think it would be something inspiring – perhaps referencing our youth or evoking a sense of agility and adaptiveness. In reality however there would be only one obvious choice: “Moorhen Media: Please can we use Zoom for that?”.
The answer to this regular question is all-too-often a hard “no”. Whether our request is pin-balled through the corporate machine, or answered straight away, Zoom can feel like a dirty word to many clients. This is a great pity because – as I hope to make very clear – we really prefer it to Teams.
Initially released in 2017, Microsoft’s Teams product has grown to a point of near-total dominance in western corporate environments. Spun out of Skype for Business, Microsoft were able to use their huge foothold in business software to rapidly expand – if one were to be uncharitable it could be likened to the spread of the virus that first made video conferencing so essential to us all.
Competitors are a rare sight these days, with Google Meet largely relegated to SME such as ourselves, BlueJeans shut down, and Webex struggling for relevance. As for Zoom, I can’t remember the last time we’ve been invited to use it to join a simple meeting. And for simple meetings, despite Team’s bugs, laggy interface, and absurd ‘new’ and ‘classic’ versions of the same app, it’s generally a perfectly serviceable solution.
But we are an events company. And for events, Zoom is to Teams what an iPhone is to those big-button flip phones for the elderly – except those big-button phones are actually pretty easy to use. While Teams’ dominance has grown, Zoom have been quietly equipping their software with a laundry list of features tailored to the technical professional.
Take their acquisition of Liminal Technologies, a company who’d built a janky solution for individual video feeds of each speaker, and a less janky one allowing physical button control of pretty much any feature within Zoom. Working from the inside, these have become extremely impressive services that allow a multi-presenter virtual event to be effectively ‘vision-mixed’ with just a StreamDeck, and for each presenter’s audio to be captured and mixed individually on complex productions.
Beyond the flashy, Zoom simply seems to demand less of the stressed, busy technician. Any participant can be the host, even if they’re not logged in. Resolution, frame rate, and audio details can be monitored for both incoming and outgoing traffic. And Zoom will accept any manner of webcam and audio source without complaint, even if it’s a fully virtual one. Teams will refuse even an audio feed from a mixing desk unless you ignore their advice, bin off both versions of the app, and join through the web.
Back in the surreal early days of COVID lockdown, Zoom seemed ideally placed to lead us from a world where video conferencing was neat to one where it was essential. So if you’re wondering why we struggle quite so much every time a remote presenter needs to be patched in, or a satellite location connected up, to persuade our client to go with Zoom, the answer comes in what happened next.
Just as demand for video calls was going through the roof across all of our personal and business lives, Zoom came under fire for lax security and misleading encryption claims. Investigations from the US’s SEC and DOJ brought further pressure, and the potential for interference from Chinese authorities, given their heavy R&D base there, drew more attention.
Just as video conferencing platforms had gained unprecedented salience, businesses across the west were rejecting the market leader and embracing a product which was demonstrably worse. Zoom’s security concerns prevented them gaining a strong foothold in businesses, not helped by Microsoft aggressively pushing Teams as a free inclusion to existing software subscriptions.
This is not to underplay the importance of corporate security – something we think a lot about when it comes to handling the confidential content we often produce. Concerns about Zoom back in 2020 and 2021 were far from unfounded, and businesses did what was logical to protect their valuable data. We cannot begrudge that.
But things have changed. As we approach 2025, Zoom have dealt with their security problems, they report clearly where your call’s data is being routed, they confirm encryption standards. They have also continually improved the service and added features. They’ve added app integrations, nurtured the companion software mentioned previously that greatly expands control over the meeting, built some incredible language interpretation solutions, and a lot more.
As for Teams? They have made their lack of interest in events and professional broadcast quite clear. After a brief glimmer of hope with their NDI video integration, this half-baked feature has remained that way, their Live Events add-on is as unreliable and frustrating as ever, and we are still seeing buggy audio, freezing video, and interface crashes when joining normal, simple calls.
With all that considered, I feel very strongly that it is time to reconsider the de-facto Zoom ban – let bygones be bygones and allow everyone to make their own choice about which software is most appropriate. And who knows, maybe with some real competition Microsoft might be forced to improve their product to a passable standard of reliability and functionality.
We thrive on making your corporate event look and sound the best it can for everyone in the audience.