One of the selling points of Zoom was that it could support a large number of users at any given time. This made it useful for companies to host meetings while their employees worked from home, or for schools to host classes and lectures that would typically have 50 or more students at once.
However, it seems that Telegram wants to challenge Zoom on that front. The company has announced an update to its platform where it seems that Telegram’s group video calls can now support as many as 1,000 users at once! This is a crazy amount of people but it should be noted that this is only for people who are tuning in.
This does not mean that there will be 1,000 people with their cameras and microphones on, but rather 1,000 who can tune into a group video call, so in a way it’s kind of like Telegram is hosting a live stream rather than a massive video conference. According to Telegram, 1,000 is just the beginning as the company plans to eventually expand on this number “until all humans on Earth can join one group call”, although we’re not sure if that’s their real intention or just marketing hyperbole.
There are a bunch of other new features, changes, and fixes in the new update so make sure you have the latest version downloaded.