Pavel Durov's announcement of group video calls on Telegram was accompanied by a short promotional video. — AFP Relaxnews
In a fresh challenge to WhatsApp, Telegram is also about to launch group video calling. The communications app is to bring out the new feature in May, offering a further incentive to attract new users to its platform.
On April 28, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced the news. The most downloaded application in January 2021 has continued to innovate and will be adding a group video conferencing feature next month.
"Speaking of video calls, we will be adding a video dimension to our voice chats in May, making Telegram a powerful platform for group video calls," wrote Pavel Durov on his personal Telegram channel.
As it stands, the exact date of the launch has yet to be disclosed. The new functionality will add to an already impressive features list, which, as the CEO explained, now includes "Screen sharing, encryption, noise-cancelling, desktop and tablet support - everything you can expect from a modern video conferencing tool, but with Telegram-level UI, speed and encryption."
The encrypted communications app already allowed users to place one-on-one video calls.
In the context of the Covid-19 crisis, Internet users faced with lockdown measures in many countries have massively adopted video-conferencing and communications apps.
For Telegram, this has led to huge growth in its customer base. The platform recently announced that it had reached the milestone of 400 million active users in April 2020.
In the wake of criticism over some of its users posting calls to violence, Telegram was given a major boost by controversy, which erupted earlier this year when WhatsApp changed its terms of use. Many of the indignant users who left the platform migrated to Telegram and the rival application Signal.
That said, the Facebook-owned communications suite still remains one of the world's most popular applications. WhatsApp already launched its one-to-one and group video calling features in 2018. – AFP Relaxnews
