India’s Reliance JioMeet To Take On Zoom

Mukesh Ambani seems to be having one of the best years of his career, proving that the COVID-19 pandemic is not a hindrance to his goals.  Mukesh Ambani’s latest product is a video conferencing app which aims to take on the hottest video conferencing app, Zoom.  The telecommunications vertical of Reliance Industries, Reliance Jio, formally launched Reliance JioMeet, on Thursday evening, which has an uncanny resemblance to Zoom.

Zoom has emerged as one of the companies which has thrived due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as businesses are forced to shut down their offices and shift their operations to remote work.  This meant the demand for a good video conferencing software shot up and Zoom stepped up to the task before Google, Microsoft and Facebook could catch up.  Zoom has also removed time limits for the conference calls and made the entire suite free of cost for schools and businesses in the affected regions across the globe, thereby further increasing its popularity.  

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However, JioMeet has a similar if not better offering than Zoom.  JioMeet offers unlimited number of free calls in high definition (720p) to users and supports as many as 100 participants on a call.  Interestingly, JioMeet appears to not impose a short time limit on a call’s duration.   Jio Platforms says a free call can be uninterrupted for “up to 24 hours” long.  The service currently has no paid plans and considering Jio’s reputation for giving services for free for years like Jio data plans, it would come as no surprise if JioMeet is also made free for the time being.

JioMeet comes at the perfect time as the Indian government suggested that Indians need to aggressively work on homegrown technologies and develop them so that they are on par with technologies developed by global giants.  The government has called for leading Indian software and IT companies to come up with an alternative for Zoom and it looks like Jio has stepped up to the task.