Does the Platform Even Matter Anymore?

Your meeting platform is the least important part of your meeting. There, I said it. Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and Teams have spent years copying each other’s media engineering. At the surface, the difference between them is smaller than that of a good microphone and a bad one.

Companies will spend months deciding which app to standardize on. Then they hang a single video bar at the far end of a 20-person room with glass on 2 walls and wonder why the remote people keep saying “sorry, can you repeat that.” The room decides whether a meeting works, and the hardware in it matters more than whatever software it’s running (in most cases).

What’s A Codec?

A codec is the software that shrinks your audio and video before it leaves your computer and rebuilds it on the other end. The word is just “coder” and “decoder” mashed together. You’ll see a lot of codec names in this post, so it’s worth 2 minutes.

First, some units. Internet speed is measured in bits per second. A kbps is a thousand bits per second, a Mbps is a million and a Gbps is a billion. Your home internet is probably somewhere in the hundreds of Mbps.

Raw, uncompressed HD video (1080p, the same sharpness as most TVs) needs about 1.5 Gbps. That’s 1920 by 1080 dots of color, redrawn 30 times a second. Google Meet sends that same picture using about 3.6 Mbps. Your laptop throws away more than 99 percent of the data on every call, and you don’t notice because the codec is very good at picking what you won’t miss.

Most of the trick is not resending what didn’t change. Every so often the codec sends 1 full picture, called a keyframe. In between, it mostly sends notes like “this patch of the picture moved 4 dots to the left.” That’s why a person sitting still in front of a plain wall barely uses any internet, and the guy waving his hands in front of a ceiling fan eats your whole connection. When a coworker’s face turns into blurry blocks for a second, their Wi-Fi dropped some of those notes and the screen is building on a picture it never fully got. It clears up at the next keyframe.

The codec names you’ll see are generations of the same idea. H.264 is the old reliable from 2003, and almost every phone and laptop has a chip built just for it. VP8 and VP9 are Google’s versions. AV1 is the newest, released in 2018 by a group of tech companies called the Alliance for Open Media. AV1 gets the same picture out of fewer bits, but the computer has to work a lot harder to make it. Keep that in mind when we get to Zoom.

One more term: SVC, short for scalable video coding. It lets your computer pack its video in layers, like a cake. The meeting server can hand the whole cake to someone on fast office internet and only the bottom layer to someone on hotel Wi-Fi. That way one person’s bad connection doesn’t drag the whole meeting down.

Voice works the same way with smaller numbers. Uncompressed CD-quality music is about 1.4 Mbps. Opus, the voice codec 3 of the 4 big meeting apps use, handles speech well with a few dozen kbps. The newest voice codecs use AI: both ends have learned what human speech sounds like, so your computer sends a short description of your voice and the other side rebuilds it. That’s how Cisco’s AI Codec gets down to 1 kbps; about 1,400 times smaller than that CD.

What’s Under The Hood

The 4 big apps are built roughly on the same idea. All of them use AV1 for at least some video. All of them send your video to a server that passes it along to everyone else, instead of stitching everyone into 1 picture first. Engineers call that kind of server an SFU (selective forwarding unit). They also max out in about the same place: 1,000 people per meeting and 1080p HD video. The differences are in the details. Here’s where things stand as of October 2026.

The table looks boring because the hard problems in video calling get solved out in the open. Most of that work happens in WebRTC, a free, open project that lets web browsers make video calls, and in the Alliance for Open Media. All 4 companies are members of both. Nobody has a secret codec (but some are better than others). Google builds its work into the Chrome browser. Zoom and Cisco build their own software on the same ideas, and Microsoft rebuilt Teams on its own engine, called SlimCore. Once everyone has the same building blocks, what’s left is judgment calls, like when to lower the picture quality and how hard to fight other apps for your internet connection.

Google Meet is built entirely on WebRTC. The server sends each person the audio of the 3 loudest speakers and up to 3 video feeds at a time. If a company firewall (the network’s security gate) blocks Meet’s preferred connection, it falls back to a slower route, and Google’s own docs admit quality takes a hit. You can’t run Meet on your own servers. HD camera video only works in the web browser and is off by default, which tells you who Meet was built for: a person sitting at a laptop. For that person, it’s a fine product.

Zoom uses its own software in its desktop app. With SVC, one laptop can send up to 4 quality levels of its video at once. Zoom added AV1 for business customers in late 2024, but Zoom’s own guidance says it only kicks in when the laptop’s video chip isn’t doing the work and the processor isn’t busy. The rest of the time it uses H.264. Translation: most company laptops aren’t using it. Zoom Node lets a company keep meeting video on its own servers, up to 400 people per server. It has a private mode that keeps a meeting completely off Zoom’s cloud, and it keeps working if Zoom’s data centers go down.

Webex uses Opus and H.264 for most things, and AV1 when you share something that moves, like a video. The voice side is where it gets interesting. Cisco’s AI Codec, available since August 2024, is one of those AI voice codecs from the last section. It runs at 1, 3 or 6 kbps and switches on by itself when 30 percent of the call’s data is getting lost on the way. For comparison, Microsoft recommends 58 kbps for Teams audio. Cisco claims about 94 percent less data than a standard codec at similar quality, and says listeners scored it above 80 out of 100 on MUSHRA, a standard listening test, at all 3 speeds. Video Mesh is Webex’s option for keeping meeting video on your own servers, and it works with end-to-end encrypted meetings. HD video in Webex meetings gets turned on by Cisco’s support team (TAC, the Technical Assistance Center) or your Cisco account team, so ask for it if your rooms can use it.

Microsoft Teams uses its SlimCore engine in the desktop app and WebRTC in the browser. Voice runs on Satin, Microsoft’s own AI-assisted codec, at 6 to 36 kbps. Microsoft says Teams has used AV1 for meeting video since late 2023 and for screen sharing since March 2024, and claims that cut the data needed for shared screens by 63 percent compared to H.264. You can’t run Teams meetings on your own servers. End-to-end encryption needs a Teams Premium license for the meeting organizer and maxes out at 200 people.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) means only the people in the meeting can unlock the audio and video, and the company running the service can’t. On every platform, turning it on also turns off recording, transcripts and the AI assistant, because those features run on the vendor’s servers and need to see the video to work. You came here for opinions, so here’s one: almost nobody should turn E2EE on by default. It’s a tool for a specific meeting with a specific threat. The first time a company lawyer finds out the board meeting wasn’t recorded because somebody checked a box for “security,” that box gets unchecked forever. Allow it, teach the 3 people who actually need it, and leave it off for everyone else.

If I’m making a buying decision, 2 rows in that table get my attention. The first is the voice codec. What an app does when 30 percent of the data goes missing is exactly what your worst conference room on your worst Wi-Fi is going to sound like, and Cisco’s AI Codec was built for that situation. The second is whether it can run on your own servers. If you’re a hospital, a bank, a defense contractor or a government agency, “no” can end the conversation, and 2 of the 4 apps say no.

Who Actually Tested This

I couldn’t find an independent test of all 4 apps from 2025 or 2026. The most recent head-to-head is a TestDevLab study from April 2024. They ran 660 meetings across all 4 apps while deliberately losing 10, 20 and 40 percent of the data, then scored the picture with VMAF, a video quality score Netflix helped create. Zoom paid for the study and Zoom published it, so give it the same trust you’d give any study the winner paid for. Zoom scored best overall, Webex finished 1 point behind, then Meet, then Teams. Webex had the best audio. Teams dropped to about 2 frames per second at 40 percent loss. That’s a slideshow.

The university research is from 2021, and all 4 apps have changed a lot since then. Chang and colleagues, presenting at IMC (the Internet Measurement Conference), found Webex stalled at around 1 Mbps, while Zoom kept looking good down to 250 kbps before falling apart. Meet was the hungriest app, using up to a gigabyte of data an hour. A University of Chicago study the same year found that when a Zoom call shared a slow connection with another app, Zoom grabbed more than 75 percent of it, while Teams backed off to about 37 percent. Zoom wins the fight for your internet connection. Whether you want your meeting app shoving everything else on your network out of the way is a question those papers didn’t ask.

Every one of these tests put a laptop on a deliberately broken connection. The apps only pull apart when 40 percent of the data is going missing or the connection is down to 250 kbps. That’s a contractor on a phone hotspot in a parking garage. On a healthy office network with good room equipment, I can’t reliably tell the 4 apart, and I doubt the people in the meeting can either. If your company network regularly loses 40 percent of your meeting data, that’s a network problem, and switching apps is the most expensive possible way to not fix it.

The Room Matters More

In 2018, researchers Eryn Newman and Norbert Schwarz played the same science talks to people, some with clear audio and some with bad audio. With bad audio, listeners rated the talk as worse, the speaker as less smart and less likable, and the research as less important. Not one word had changed. Schwarz’s summary was that when information is hard to take in, people trust it less.

Every remote person listening to a badly built conference room is in that position. The people in the room are losing credibility and have no idea it’s happening. A video bar (the all-in-one camera, mic and speaker that sits above or below the TV) mounted too far from the table sounds bad on every app. So does a room with hard walls and nothing to soak up sound. Echo cancelling, mic pickup and camera framing all happen in the room before anything reaches the internet. The app can only work with what the room gives it.

The 2 things that go wrong most often both have numbers attached.

The first is distance. Sound level is measured in decibels (dB). Outdoors, it drops about 6 dB every time you double your distance from the person talking. Indoors it’s closer to 3 dB because the walls bounce some sound back, but that bounced sound arrives late and smeared, which is the problem. A person at the end of a 20-person table is about 20 feet from a video bar on the far wall. A mic on the table or in the ceiling is 2 to 3 feet from them. That’s 3 or 4 doublings of distance. The bar hears a voice 10 to 20 dB quieter than a nearby mic would, so it turns itself up. Turning up also boosts the air conditioning and every echo off the glass. No codec can undo that. The AI noise filtering every company advertises now is genuinely impressive, and it’s being asked to clean up a mess that a mic on the table would have prevented.

The second is echo, which sound people call reverberation. The standard measure is RT60: how long a sound takes to fade out after it stops (technically, to drop by 60 dB). A conference room should be around half a second, and AVIXA, the audio-video industry’s trade group, recommends about 0.6 seconds or less. A room with glass on 2 walls, a hard ceiling and a shiny table often runs over a full second. At that point the mic hears every word twice and the people on the other end hear mush. Sound-absorbing panels on the 1 wall you can treat plus proper ceiling tiles will fix it. I’ve never seen a software license fix a room that echoes for a second.

Vendor surveys point the same way, with the usual caveat about who paid for them. Owl Labs’ 2025 report found 76 percent of workers say echo is a regular problem, and 77 percent have lost meeting time to tech trouble. Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index found 43 percent of remote employees don’t feel included in meetings. It’s hard to feel included when you can’t hear the end of the table.

A lot of new equipment is aimed right at this. Cisco’s Board Pro G3 has 14 microphones that work together to aim at whoever is talking, plus 2 high-resolution 4K cameras. Shure’s MXA925 ceiling mic uses AI to strip out echo. Teams, Zoom, Meet and Cisco all have a feature that cuts each person in the room into their own video tile, as if everyone joined from their own laptop (Teams calls it IntelliFrame, Zoom calls it Smart Gallery, Meet calls it dynamic tiles and Cisco calls it Cinematic Meetings). Every one of them depends on the camera in the room. The software can only frame people the camera can actually see.

Cisco’s announcements at WebexOne, its big yearly conference in early October, went after the other half of room audio: the speakers. The new Ceiling Speaker Pro works with Cisco’s ceiling mics and cameras to figure out where voices are coming from and send sound where it’s needed. A feature called adaptive voice lift quietly boosts voices through the ceiling, so people can hear each other across a long table or hear the presenter at the front. Espen Løberg, who runs Cisco’s devices business, told UC Today that customers had been asking Cisco to build a speaker for years. RoomOS 27, the November software update for Cisco’s room devices, also adds better focus on the voices that matter and smarter noise removal, running on an AI chip from NVIDIA that’s built into Cisco’s newer devices. Every one of those features still assumes the mics and speakers are where the people are.

My rule, and this is opinion: a single video bar is the right answer up to about 8 seats and the wrong answer past that, no matter whose logo is on it. The most common “this room doesn’t work” room I walk into has 12 to 20 seats and 1 bar on the far wall, because the bar was the easy answer and nobody called an AV integrator (the company that designs and installs room audio and video). The fix is a camera by the TV and microphones where the people sit. That’s true on all 4 apps.

Licensing Is Where They Actually Differ

Every conference room needs a room license from whichever meeting app it runs, and that license decides which features the room gets.

Teams Rooms Basic covers up to 25 rooms, and it does less than most people assume. You get one-touch join and screen sharing. 2 screens, the front row layout, smart camera features, remote management, usage reports and security controls are all Pro. For a huddle room (a small room for about 4 people with 1 TV), Basic is fine. For any room where you care whether the people on the other end can see faces, Basic is the version that generates the “Teams Rooms doesn’t work” help desk tickets. Plan on Pro from day one for any room with 2 screens or more than 1 camera.

Hardware That Runs More Than One Platform

The equipment on a conference room wall usually outlasts the company’s contract with the meeting app, and the apps keep changing underneath it. 2 things happened this year that prove it.

In September 2026, Google announced it’s moving Meet room equipment from ChromeOS to Android and stopped approving new ChromeOS devices. ChromeOS is the operating system that runs Chromebooks. Existing ChromeOS rooms are supported through September 2030, but Logitech and CTL stop making their ChromeOS room computers in February 2027 and ASUS follows in April 2027. If you bought a ChromeOS Meet room in 2025, you own something with a published end date.

Microsoft is making its own change to the Teams Rooms devices that run Android. It’s moving them onto MDEP (Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform), its own managed version of Android, and has confirmed MDEP will be standard on all newly certified Android devices. It’s also moving management of those devices out of the Teams admin site and into its Pro Management Portal between June and October 2026. In an early 2026 survey, 47 percent of resellers said they expect equipment makers without MDEP to lose sales.

That’s the world you’re buying equipment into. Buy for the app you might be on in 2029, and the one you’re on today.

This is where Cisco’s WebexOne news matters most. Cisco room devices run Cisco’s own operating system, RoomOS, and they already run Teams Rooms natively. The newest ones are certified for Teams through October 2030. Zoom for Cisco Rooms, which opens Zoom meetings from Cisco’s normal home screen, went live in January 2026. The full Zoom Rooms experience, where the device looks and acts like any other Zoom room, was announced in June with a September target and shipped in the October RoomOS update on October 12. It runs the Zoom Rooms app on top of RoomOS, so Zoom handles the meeting side and Cisco’s management tools still handle the hardware.

At WebexOne on October 7, Cisco announced a partnership with Google to run full Google Meet natively on Cisco devices. It’s part of RoomOS 27, scheduled for November. Once that ships, Cisco will be the only hardware line that runs all 4 apps natively. Release dates move for every vendor, so check the release notes before you promise anyone a date. Logitech, Poly and Neat support Teams, Zoom and Meet. None of them run Webex.

Here’s why that matters for a normal company. Most big organizations run more than one meeting app, like Teams in most rooms and Zoom in the department that works with Zoom-heavy clients. Until now, that usually meant buying different equipment from different companies for different rooms, each with its own management tools. UC Today’s take is that one set of hardware running every app removes one of the main reasons to do that. Løberg’s point to them was that the meeting app shouldn’t be what decides the hardware.

On Cisco devices you pick the app during setup, with a factory reset or 1 command, and Teams and Zoom can’t run on the same device at the same time. The cameras, mics and cabling stay exactly the same either way, which matters a lot when the CIO changes their mind.

When a room can’t run the app a meeting is on, it joins as a guest, and that’s where the compromises live. A Teams Room joining a Zoom or Webex meeting through Direct Guest Join gets 720p video (a step below HD) on 1 screen, and you can’t share your laptop through the room’s HDMI cable, because the room is running the other app’s web version inside Teams. SIP join gets full HD on 2 screens with HDMI sharing. SIP is the standard most business phone and video systems use to call each other, and Microsoft added SIP join to Teams Rooms on Android through mid-2026. It also needs Teams Rooms Pro and a third-party connection service like Pexip. If your company lives on Teams and one department has Zoom customers, you’re going to get asked about this. The honest answer is “it works, at 720p, on 1 screen, unless we add Pexip.”

I’ll repeat this at the end, but here it is: pick room equipment that runs the app you’re not on. If you’re a Teams shop, buy rooms that also do Zoom and Meet. If there’s any chance you end up on Webex, that currently narrows the list to 1 vendor, and you should know that going in.

Cisco’s Version of AV over IP

AV over IP means the room’s audio and video gear (the AV) plugs into regular network jacks and talks over the same kind of network your computers use (the IP, short for internet protocol), instead of running on its own special cables. It isn’t new. Dante has been the standard way to send audio over a network in professional AV for years, and newer standards called SDVoE, NDI and IPMX do the same for video. In an April 2026 survey by Audinate (the company behind Dante) and Futuresource of 370 customers and 100 installers, 67 percent of customers said they already send audio over their network and 59 percent said the same for video. What’s new is a meeting-room company building it straight into the room system.

On a Cisco room, the main box runs a small private network just for its accessories. Cisco calls that box a codec, the same word from earlier, because encoding and decoding the meeting is its main job. Plug a Cisco mic or camera into that network and it finds the main box and connects on its own, encrypted. The Room Kit Pro G2, shipping since spring 2026, has 8 network ports that also deliver power, so 1 cable does both jobs. That’s called PoE, short for power over Ethernet. It handles up to 5 network cameras and 8 of Cisco’s table or ceiling microphones, and it speaks AES67, an open standard for sending audio over a network, so it can connect to other brands’ audio gear. The Room Vision PTZ camera (PTZ means it can pan, tilt and zoom) gets power, video, control and software updates over a single network cable. The Ceiling Microphone Pro has 64 tiny mics working together and covers a circle about 23 feet across.

The newest piece is the Ceiling Speaker Pro, announced at WebexOne on October 7. It also runs on 1 network cable and speaks AES67. Cisco’s pitch is that it finishes the set, with the main box, cameras, mics and speakers all on the network and managed together, so the room no longer needs a separate amplifier and a tangle of speaker wire. Check Cisco’s data sheet to confirm which room systems support it before you plan around it.

When the room needs more ports, Cisco’s design guide adds a small, silent network switch, the Catalyst 9200CX, set up to treat meeting audio and video as high-priority traffic so it doesn’t get stuck behind someone’s file download. The traditional way to build a room uses a box that routes HDMI signals, cable extenders and a separate audio processor. Compared to that, you end up with fewer boxes and none of the special control systems that need their own programmers. Troubleshooting turns into checking network ports and settings, which your IT team already knows how to do.

Most rooms stay broken because the people who can see the problem (IT), can’t touch the AV equipment, and the people who can touch the AV equipment work for an outside contractor. Put the room on the network and the IT team can fix it whenever they want.

Cisco’s WebexOne announcements push further in that direction. RoomOS 27 and Cisco Cloud Control, Cisco’s central management dashboard, add tools for the people who run rooms. Workplace Designer plans a whole floor or building, including the network gear, before anything gets installed. Smart Room Assurance checks that a room is set up and tuned correctly. Workplace Advisor and Workplace Insights show how rooms actually get used, including rooms that get booked and then sit empty. RoomOS 27 also adds features for divisible rooms, the big rooms with a movable wall down the middle. When a meeting goes wrong, Cisco says its AI Canvas tool can pull in data from the room device, the company network and the internet connection at the same time, so IT isn’t guessing which one broke.

There are a few things to plan around, and I’d rather you hear them from me than the day of install. The plug-and-play accessories are Cisco’s own. Other brands’ audio gear connects through AES67 only, so Dante equipment has to run in its AES67 mode, and you lose Dante’s own management tools when it does. I haven’t seen published install time numbers yet, so get those from your installer for your specific room. I also couldn’t confirm which of these accessories work when a Cisco device is running Teams Rooms or Zoom Rooms instead of Webex.

Crestron, Q-SYS, Yealink and Neat all sell network-first room products too. What’s different with Cisco is that the main box, the accessories and the network switch all come from 1 company, and the switch is the same kind your network team already manages. For anything bigger than a huddle room, I’d look at a network-based design before buying another traditional HDMI setup. Then I’d ask whoever is quoting the traditional setup to explain, specifically, what it does that the network can’t.

What’s Next?

The apps will keep getting closer on call quality, because the core engineering is being done in the open. The competition shifts to AI features, and AI features come down to licensing and where your email, files and calendar already live. A company that runs on Microsoft 365 is going to pick Teams, and that’s a reasonable choice. A company on Google Workspace is going to pick Meet. Zoom and Webex have to win on rooms, call quality and the option to run on your own servers, because they don’t own your calendar.

Cisco’s WebexOne news fits that pattern. Besides opening its rooms to all 4 apps, Cisco said Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s dots assistant will be able to work inside the Webex app, with most of that planned for early 2027. In the room itself, RoomOS 27 adds a Cisco AI Assistant you can talk to in 32 languages instead of digging through menus on the touch panel. Cisco’s example is telling the room it’s too warm and having it turn down the temperature and lower the blinds. That only works if the room is actually wired into the building’s heating and blinds, so plan it like a building project. UC Today’s read is that Cisco is betting on the hardware, network and management underneath, whichever meeting app or AI a customer picks. The rest of the WebexOne news, like Dialog for customer service centers, is about software more than meeting rooms.

For rooms, here’s the advice I actually give, in the order I give it.

1. Pick the meeting app for business reasons and stop agonizing. How you come across on a call depends on the microphone more than the app.
2. Before buying anything for a room with more than 8 seats, test it. Clap your hands in it. If you can hear the sound hang in the air, you need sound treatment whether you planned for it or not, and it comes before the camera.
3. Put the money in microphones, cameras, sound treatment and the network, in roughly that order. A ceiling mic and 2 wall panels will beat switching apps every time.
4. Get Teams Rooms Pro, Zoom’s Enhanced Media or the equivalent for any room with 2 screens or more than 1 camera. The features those rooms need live in those tiers.
5. Buy equipment that runs more than one app. There’s a good chance you switch apps before that equipment wears out, and the ChromeOS rooms sold in 2025 are the proof.
6. For anything bigger than a huddle room, get a network-based (AV over IP) design quoted next to the traditional HDMI design and compare how many boxes each one needs.
7. Leave end-to-end encryption off by default and turn it on for the meetings that need it.

People love arguing about which meeting app to use because it comes with logos and a vendor dinner. The room question comes with sound panels and network cables, and nobody has ever taken me to dinner over a network cable. No outcome of the app argument changes what the person at the end of the table sounds like to everyone who isn’t in the room.