Zoom Rooms vs Teams Rooms: compare multi-stream mode before you pick a platform

Alright everybody - if you're researching whether you want to do Zoom Rooms or Teams Rooms and you really care about what the end user experience is going to be like, let me encourage you to focus on something called multi-camera mode, or multi-stream mode. Both Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms have it. What it does is give a better view of the participants in the room, so you can see those little nonverbals. You feel closer to them. It's less like you're seeing one room and more like individuals. When you're a remote participant, you don't just see the room - you're seeing individual feeds of the participants. It helps you feel more connected, and you're going to have a better quality of life because of it. More work satisfaction.

So why would you choose one or the other? Honestly, if you're already a Teams shop - you're using Teams chat - don't uproot that unless you've got a really good reason. If you're using Google Workspace, Zoom is a really good bolt-on, because Google Meet is free - but is free actually free, or is it actually costing you money? Pay a little bit for Zoom and get an ROI on it.

Let's look at the differences between the Teams version and the Zoom version. Teams calls it Cloud IntelliFrame. There's a multi-stream IntelliFrame too that happens on the device, but Cloud IntelliFrame is what we're talking about today. The prerequisites, from Microsoft's page: a new experience that allows online meeting attendees to see people in Teams Rooms more clearly through smart video feeds of the in-room participants, created by zooming in on their faces and eliminating distractions. So it takes a single video feed from your camera, sends it to the Microsoft data centers, finds the faces, breaks the feed apart, and recombines those into a single video stream - rather than one wide feed of the room. That's kind of neat.

You're going to need the Pro license, and this is for MTRoW - MTR on Windows, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. This is not a Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android feature; you've got to have Windows for this. Which I think is great, because most larger rooms that would need this should be using MTRoW anyway. There are just so many more features in the Windows version.

Cameras: enabled by default, and there's a list of certified cameras. Then, how to manage it - someone talk me down. Why are they still requiring you to go onto the device and create an XML file? Maybe that's just an option - hopefully. Zoom doesn't have this. There are no files to configure on a Zoom Room; it's all in the cloud, and it's very comprehensive. You change everything in the management portal.

Are there any hardware requirements for the CPU? I don't think so - i5, i7, no hard requirement. Most MTRs that sell these days, the Windows ones, are minimum i5, and some come with the U5s, which have the NPU built into the chip, so you get the NPU advantages there. And if there are no hardware requirements beyond the camera, then obviously the processing is being done in the cloud.

Now the Zoom version. It's called Smart Gallery, and it does have hardware requirements - which means it's happening on-prem. For Mac Zoom Rooms or Windows Zoom Rooms: an i7 or i9, 11th or 12th generation or higher, one Smart Gallery camera, and one or two cameras in multi-camera mode. The fact that you can do this with an M1 chip on a Mac is just fantastic. You can get a Mac mini for around $800, and they are screamers. You can lock them down so they can't be misused - you're not going to leave a keyboard and mouse attached to this thing anyway. My suggestion: go with the Apple Silicon Mac minis and run your Zoom Rooms on that.

Now, what's the biggest difference between these two, besides the hardware requirements? I think it's this. I asked ChatGPT whether Cloud IntelliFrame sends individuals as independent video streams to desktop participants or as a single stream. The answer: it uses cloud AI to crop individuals - good - but those people are not independent participant video streams that users can individually pin, rearrange, or spotlight. That's maybe medium-level importance. But when you're a remote participant, there's a lot of value when someone's talking. In Zoom, at minimum, you can double-click a participant and they go full screen, so you can better see their facial expressions - and when you do that, it also adjusts their feed resolution, so it gets clearer. Double-click again and you're back to gallery view.

What about Zoom Room Smart Gallery? It sends multiple separate video streams - unlike Microsoft Cloud IntelliFrame's composite room tile. So when you're using Smart Gallery, remote participants can move those tiles around, double-click to see an individual tile, and have a more in-person-like experience. Which is what you're trying to replicate anyway.

So like I said: when would you choose one or the other? If you've already got a Teams environment, just enable this for it. If it's greenfield and you're working with Google Workspace, Zoom is a no-brainer - absolutely go Zoom. And if you're on the fence, key in on what the end users want. When they walk out of a room, what's the best case for what happened in there? Are they having one-to-one meetings with a remote participant who's never on site, as part of long meetings? Are these people key decision makers who need to hear, see, and feel everything in the room - are they part of the energy? How long are the meetings - half an hour, four hours? As you gain knowledge of how these meetings are run and what kinds of conversations are happening in them, you can start to form a decision on the hardware and the platforms to use.

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