Video Editor: Cyrus John
WhatsApp has rolled out a beta version of its Group Video Calling feature that was announced at Facebook's developer conference F8 earlier this year. The feature is available only to beta users (the program is currently full).
WhatsApp Group Video Calling allows a user to make a simultaneous video call to three other people, enabling a four-way group video call. This feature is already available with services like Skype. It will become available to all users only a couple of months from now.
If you have WhatsApp version 2.18.189 installed on your phone and have signed up as a beta tester (too late for that now), you will be able to try this feature out.
Four of us at The Quint office decided to try it out, as one of us was a beta user. Despite having high-speed Wi-Fi clocked at over 80Mbps, we just couldn't get it to work despite multiple attempts with different phones. It's possibly a bug that WhatsApp is already fixing.
Getting a simultaneous call going to more than two people at a time wasn't possible. The app would keep disconnecting the primary caller and then freeze, trying to reconnect. Anyway, we didn't give up. Here's a record of our futile attempts at getting WhatsApp Group Video Calling to work. We hope to get you a seamless video when this bug is fixed.
On a side note, we also tried out Google Duo (great call quality, but only one-to-one) and Facebook Messenger (check out the World Cup special flags and crazy face AR stickers), while trying to get WhatsApp Group Video Calling to work.
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