2020 was a challenging year for most of us. It was also a year for big milestones. 

While the pandemic largely defined the year, so did our collective rise to the challenge of dealing with it. For businesses of all sizes, this meant suddenly rethinking how we work and how we do business. With the shift to remote work and contactless customer interactions, video conferencing got suddenly thrust into the spotlight, quickly transitioning from nice-to-have to necessity. Every indication is that this change is permanent.

We saw record adoption of meetings with our existing customers, as well as driving adoption decisions with our growing list of new customers. We invested heavily in scalability and availability to meet the sudden and sustained increase in demand while making sure we continued to deliver uncompromising audio and video quality.

Our customers were better prepared than most, but we jumped to build new features and improvements critical to making remote teams more productive. 2020 brought significant enhancements to 8x8 Meet, fueled by customer feedback. At the forefront was our continued emphasis on security. 8x8 was first to market with end to end encryption, which we announced in April as a beta and rolled out into full production in June. 8x8 Meet remains the only video conferencing solution that is in full production with true end-to-end encryption today.

But that’s not all. We also improved 8x8 Meet in the following ways:

  • Increasing the active meeting participant limit from 50 to 100
  • Adding moderation enhancements including sole moderator capabilities, moderator delegation, meeting lock, and a participant lobby
  • Introducing meeting analytics to allow admins to proactively monitor meetings quality, and gain insights into meetings usage and adoption
  • Customized branding, allowing customers to personalize meeting experience with custom backgrounds, logos, and vanity meeting URLs
  • Sharing computer audio and YouTube videos while in a meeting
  • Manual bandwidth controls to allow participants to manually adjust video quality based on changing bandwidth conditions
  • A pre-join screen for users that do not have a login or are not hosts to configure and test their audio and video devices prior to joining a meeting
  • Embedding meeting links as an iFrame on any web page

As we head towards the new year, we are renewing our commitment to helping you connect and work better. Thank you for your feedback and partnership as we transform communications together.

Meanwhile, stay up to date with the latest developments on 8x8 Meet