Virtual Weddings
Sharing your Wedding
Our world has changed dramatically. Innovations and technology have become important in adapting to what has to happen. Weddings with social distancing has created a paradigm in thinking. One solution to brides is video conferencing. Video conferencing (or video conference) means to conduct a conference between two or more participants at different sites by using computer networks to transmit audio and video data. This tool can be used for both planning and hosting a wedding.
A bride planning a wedding can set up a video conference between family members, friends and vendors in discussing wedding plans. Documents like price plans, guests list, contracts, etc can be shared on the screen. This is especially helpful if individuals live far away.
A bride can hold a virtual wedding. Even with social distancing and limiting numbers, guests can still participate virtually. The video conference can all be recorded and be part of the memories with other photos and videos. When this epidemic is over, then you can have a celebration party and get together and relive the momentous moment.
Society still needs to get together to eat, dance and laugh together. Weddings make a good opportunity for that. Even if the celebration has to be delayed.
There is several video conference services available or you can use facebook live and instagram live. Most offer free plans and several tier plans with added features. You may find someone in education or business that already has a plan with upgraded features that may let you use it for your wedding. Here are ten choices to consider.
Zoom Meeting is a popular choice. With an enormous number of people social distancing as the world tries to curb the spread of novel coronavirus, Zoom has become a key tool for working from home and online schooling. It makes a great choice for weddings. Zoom offers rich features for hosts and participants, stellar performance, and free plans. Zoom has a video conferencing and messaging solution for desktop and mobile devices, that aims to be very quick and easy to set up, and offer a wide range of scalable features.
Not only does it provide HD video and audio, but it can support up to 1,000 participants at the same time, and up to 49 videos on a single screen, though such large gatherings are probably best suited to big-screen monitors.
Meetings can be saved locally or to the cloud, along with transcripts that have searchable text to work with. Additionally, collaboration is built in with the ability for participants to share their screens and work together to provide their own notes as required.
On top of this a team chat feature allows for file sharing, a searchable history, and a ten year archive.
Security is built-in, using 256-bit TLS encryption for both meetings and shared files, and automated scheduling can be done from Gmail, Outlook, and iCal.
Even better is that a feature-rich free tier is available, and able to accommodate up to 100 people for up to 40 minutes, but to include additional tools for team administration and management pricing starts at $14.99 a month, rising to $19.99 a month per host for more dedicated business and enterprise packages.
ClickMeeting begins at $25 per month (when billed annually for its MyWebinars tier), and focuses most of its product development on webinars, though it can serve as a general video conference solution. The webinar focus actually lends some additional quality to the video conferencing by boosting your audio-visual experience and incorporating a lot of meeting controls for the host. Still, it's slightly more costly.
RingCentral has long been a maker of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony solutions aimed primarily at midsize and larger businesses. RingCentral Meetings begins at $14.99 per user per month for the Essentials plan. While it's a solid solution at a competitive price, its collaboration features lag just slightly behind ClickMeeting.
Hosting webinars and collaborating during online meetings, something Intermedia has enabled via a small but fairly intuitive collection of collaboration and screen-sharing capabilities.
Intermedia AnyMeeting is not a new entrant into the video conferencing segment. The platform has been around in some shape or form since 2011 and was originally called Freebinar.
Leading video conferencing services have developed into feature-rich platforms that bring sophisticated functionality, including screen sharing, private chat, video playback, and hand raising features. These capabilities let customers go beyond meetings to perform tasks such as delivering events. Yet some brides may decide they want to forgo those features to focus instead on a service that's simple for even tech beginners to use quickly. That's where Zoho Meeting (which begins at $8 per month) comes in as perhaps the easiest-to-use video conferencing service on the market. A drawback is its fairly bare-bones feature set compared with competitors such as ClickMeeting. However, it is, by far, the cheapest option. So, if you are budget conscious and don't need the extra bells and whistles, then this could be a good option.
Still, Zoho Meeting just recently added camera-based conferencing functionality, which is a good attempt to compete with the video conferencing elites. However, it remains a tool best used for basic remote support, team collaboration, and application-based demonstrations.
Cisco offers several different collaboration solutions, though its Webex Meetings offering, which begins at $13.50 per month for the Starter plan. It is probably the most broadly applicable and best-suited for small to midsize businesses. Cisco Webex Meetings offers a limited free plan and a free trial of its paid features. This service is easy to use and includes some features you won't find in other video conferencing services, including the ability to have the meeting call you rather than you dialing in. All plans include toll dial-in numbers that have coverage in 45 countries. Cisco has dropped the price considerably again, which might put it more squarely in the sights of budget-conscious customers. The free package includes 1GB of cloud storage, unlimited meetings of unlimited length and the ability to make MP4 recordings of them. That recording is important to preserve your wedding memories. Security is done by encryption, and backed by Cisco's networking know-how means performance is impressive.
Go Tomeetings is the standalone webconferencing service provided by LogMeIn. One of the features that sets GoToMeetings apart is its mobile friendliness - you can set up and start a conference from your smartphone, something some big brand software would struggle to do. There are also settings to maximize call and image quality, as well as one-tap invites to join meetings as well as chats.
Mobile apps are provided separately for Android and iOS, and both have high positive review volumes, which again makes a change from some other providers who struggle to balance quality and usability with mobile use.
Hangouts meet is part of the G Suite office productivity platform, and aims to provide a first-class conferencing service. Developed specifically for business needs, it can cater for a large number of users at once, and also uses smart participation and a fast interface to reduce the need to wait. As an improved version of the standard Google Hangouts, it aims to make it easier to work with external guests. It does this first by providing a web app experience, which means there is no software to download. Secondly, it also provides a dedicated dial-in number, which not only means that guests on the go can join in, but this also ensure that line quality is maintained and that there are no drop-outs.
As well as having dedicated apps available for mobile users in the Apple AppStore and Google Play store for Android, Google Hangouts Meet can also work with existing conferencing hardware.
Another key advantage is that by being within the G Suite platform it's easy to use data from other applications, not least Google Calendar, to not just plan meetings but also set up event information as required when users do sign in.
The other big plus is that Hangouts itself doesn't come with the big monthly costs that other providers might charge.
Ultimately, Hangout Meets is a serious business-grade conferencing platform that doesn't require big up-front costs for hardware, making it especially accessible for brides.
Lifesize provides high definition video conferencing endpoints, touchscreen conference room phones and a cloud-based video collaboration platform.
Lifesize has three pricing tiers. There was no free tier, however that has changed with Lifesize Go, a completely free browser-based version of Lifesize’s service that allows users to host an unlimited number of video calls (plus screen sharing on desktop) with up to 8 participants, no caps on meeting length and no app downloads.
Lifesize Standard is designed for small teams and costs $16.95 per host per month, and offers unlimited meetings for up to 100 participants, along with Single Sign On (SSO) support, personal meeting support, as well as lone chat and support.
Lifesize Plus is aimed at small and midsize companies, offering more features but a minimum of 15 hosts and costs $14.95 per host per month. This allows for up to 300 participants, includes Microsoft integrations, offers real-time meeting insights, phone and email support, as well as 1 hour cloud recording per host.
Lifesize Enterprise costs $12.95 per month with a minimum of 50 hosts. This plan allows for live streaming of up to 1,000 viewer events, unlimited US audio calling, branding and customization, premium support, as well as unlimited video recording.
Outside of the free version, Lifesize’s prices may seem a bit steep compared to other video conferencing solutions. This is more than made up for with the inclusion of its own hardware into the mix. Users receive numerous devices in each plan, freeing them from not having to rely on their own integrated camera systems. Lifesize also supports 4k video conferencing.
Skype is very much a household name, which will serve as a strong draw from many people. While Microsoft's video chat tool is often thought of as being little more than a way of keeping in touch with friends and family, the cross-platform app also supports group video calling for up to 50 people.
Skype can also be used in a browser, which is great for chatting with people without the app installed – you can simply invite them to join in using their email address.
As you would hope, there is a screen sharing option, and to make it easier to focus on who you are speaking to, there is the ability to automatically blur backgrounds. Other handy features include live subtitling of conversations, and the ability to record chats.
If you need to have video meetings that involve more people, Skype for Business is a paid-for upgrade. For a low monthly per-user fee, you gain support for chats with up to 250 participants and stronger security options.