Facebook Messenger Now Has Movie Talk
Facebook Messenger just recently launched its free VOIP movie calling feature over both cellular and Wi-Fi connections for Android and iOS users based in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and fifteen other countries that include Mexico, Uruguay, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Nigeria, Oman, and Laos.
This means that any user with a mobile device and with a cellular or Wi-Fi connection can conduct a movie talk with somebody (who is similarly tooled/connected) via the Facebook Messenger app on their handsets. And it does not matter what mobile connection both parties have — as long as it is decent enough, they can movie talk for as long as they want.
The social media giant very first introduced movie calling in two thousand eleven in partnership with Skype. Facebook eventually developed its own movie calling feature, and by bringing it to mobile users via Messenger, it could give Skype, FaceTime (for iOS users only), and Google Hangouts a run for their money.
Facebook certainly has the built-in user base to make its free VOIP movie calling take off. The social media giant already has 1.44 billion users (and counting), and its Messenger app is used by about six hundred million people around the world. As exposed by Facebook mastermind Mark Zuckerberg, Messenger already makes up ten percent of the global volume of mobile VOIP calls, and he further believes that high audio quality VOIP movie calling will eventually substitute traditional phone calling methods in the next few years.
And the fine thing about it is that Facebook has no plans to charge fees for audio or movie calling. Instead, the company is banking on the notion that more messaging activity permits more people to lock on Facebook’s News Feed, where the social media makes geysers of money from ads.
Using Facebook Messenger’s free VOIP movie calling is pretty straightforward. Users need only tap the movie camera icon located on the top right corner when they are having a Messenger talk with a Facebook contact, in order to make a movie call. Cameras are in selfie mode by default, but users can toggle to the rear side camera if they want to. This fresh feature also cleverly lets one party turn off their movie feed in order to make the person at the other end provide a better movie quality.
There is a catch, however. For now, mobile Messenger users can not movie call with desktop Facebook users. But according to Stan Chudnovsky, the head of product of Facebook Messenger, they should be able to fix that too pretty soon.