Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., arrives for a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Facebook announced Wednesday that video conferencing apps headlined by Zoom will be coming to its Portal video-calling devices in a few weeks.
Zoom, BlueJeans, LogMeIn‘s GoToMeeting and Cisco‘s Webex will arrive on the Portal Mini, Portal and Portal+ in September. The video-calling services will arrive on the Portal TV “in the future.”
The addition of these popular video-conferencing apps should be a major boon for the Portal, one of the social media company’s few plays in hardware alongside the Oculus virtual-reality headsets.
Video-conferencing apps have seen major upticks in usage due to more people working from home as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom’s mobile app had 173 million monthly active users in May, up from a mere 14 million in March, according to app-analytics company Apptopia. Webex had more than 500 million users who generated 25 billion meeting minutes in April, triple the volume in February, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call in May.
Facebook introduced its first Portal devices in 2018, but they initially struggled to gain adoption due to privacy concerns. Portal units gained some traction earlier this year, selling out online following work-from-home orders.
Currently, Portal can be used to make video calls via Messenger, WhatsApp and Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise communication software.
–CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
