Zoom: What It Is, History, and How It Works

Use it for video conferences or just quick phone calls

By
Dave Johnson
Dave Johnson
Dave Johnson
Writer
  • Rutgers University
  • Central Michigan University
Dave Johnson has been writing about tech since 1990. He's the author of over 2 dozen books and his writing has appeared in Wired, PCWorld, Business Insider, and many other publications.
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Updated on May 16, 2024
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What to Know

  • Zoom is a web conferencing platform that is used for audio and/or video conferencing.
  • You need a free account to start your own calls for up to 100 people; paid versions can support up to 1,000 people.
  • You can make unlimited phone calls, hold unlimited meetings, and even record both.

What Is Zoom?

Zoom is an online audio and web conferencing platform. People use it to make phone calls or to participate in video conference meetings.

Zoom's History Snapshot

It was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former Cisco executive. Cisco offered the WebEx web conferencing platform, which remains a competitor in the conferencing space today. Yuan's competitor, Zoom, evolved quickly; the service launched in 2013 and had a million users by the end of the year.

By 2017, the company had a billion-dollar valuation. It became a publicly-traded company in 2019 and has grown into one of the biggest video conferencing solutions in use today.

Zoom is one of the most commonly used conferencing tools, sometimes outpacing similar solutions like Skype and Google Chat in various surveys.

Man using a web conferencing service on a laptop
 Getty Images / filadendron

What Is a Zoom Meeting?

Though Zoom offers a lot of products and services to enterprise organizations, including Zoom Rooms (which are conference rooms running dedicated software to make conferencing easier), video webinars, and even phone systems,

Zoom's core product and the way most people know the service is Zoom Meetings. Zoom Meetings are the audio and video conferences that allow two or more people to communicate online.

Zoom Meetings happen in the Zoom app, and can be started and shared by anyone; these meetings can even be started for free via the app, if you have it installed, or via the Zoom web site.

You can also use Zoom on your phone or cast it to your television.

How Zoom Works

You don't need a paid subscription to start using Zoom. In fact, if someone else sets up the Zoom Meeting and invites you, all you need to do is follow the instructions in the email invitation to start using Zoom.

You'll need to click a link to install the Zoom app, and then enter the conference code to sign into the meeting to which you've been invited.

To start your own Zoom Meeting, you'll need a Zoom account, which you can create for free. Go to the Zoom web site and click Sign Up, It's Free at the top of the page and follow the instructions. Once completed, you'll be able to start your own meetings.

 Zoom offers several Zoom Meeting plans. Basic is free and lets you host meetings with up to 100 participants, with a limit of 40 minutes per meeting. You can also have an unlimited number of one-on-one meetings. All of these meetings can be audio-only or video conferences.

Even at the free account level, you can record and save your meetings, share your desktop with the meeting attendees, and use chat tools during the meeting.

If the fairly generous features of the free Basic plan are not enough, it's possible to pay for Zoom Pro, Zoom Business, or Zoom Enterprise.

Each of these adds substantial additional features, like the ability to conference more than 100 people at a time and extending the meeting duration past 40 minutes (in fact, a meeting can be up to 24 hours long). Depending on the selected plan, features can include things like cloud storage, AI features, and translated captions.

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