Today, Zoom announced a new offering that will allow anyone to host an extra-large, high-capacity virtual meeting. This feature is mainly aimed at political events involving fundraising. Until now, Zoom Webinars only supported up to 100,000 attendees and 1,000 panelists. The new offering provides single-use Zoom Webinars licenses that can accommodate up to 1 million attendees, and the webinars can last up to 30 hours.
With the new offering, single-use licenses in the U.S. can host large webinars of the following sizes:
- 10,000
- 20,000
- 30,000
- 50,000
- 100,000
- 500,000
- 1 million
John Beckmann, Group Product Manager and head of Meetings at Zoom, said:
"Don’t let the size of your crowd impact your ability to host an engaging memorable event. From small online workshops to concert broadcasts of 1 million attendees, Zoom can help."
Once the webinar starts, attendees can join from any of the supported web browsers or the Zoom app, which is available across mobile and desktop platforms. Zoom also enables people conducting webinars to ask questions and collect feedback easily through the polls feature. Zoom recently updated its polls feature to support larger audiences.
Zoom provides several controls to reduce the risk of disruptions from the huge number of attendees. For example, organizers can limit audio, video, and screen sharing for all attendees and enable it only for presenters.
Zoom also allows Webinar customers to customize the look and feel of each event. For example, customers can change wallpaper and nametags. The flexible pricing model will enable customers to pay per event, per month, or year.
For customers who purchase a single-use 250k+ attendees webinar license, a Zoom production specialist will be provided in place of the event consultant to provide technical support for A/V production.
For comparison, Microsoft Teams webinars only support up to 1,000 attendees. For a larger crowd, Microsoft Teams Town halls support up to 20,000 attendees. With Zoom now supporting up to a million attendees, Microsoft Teams has to step up its game to remain competitive against Zoom in the webinar market.