According to the latest news, Telegram is set to add a group video calling service to its messaging platform. Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and CEO has announced that Telegram will get a group video call feature by the next month. Earlier week, Durov announced this on his personal Telegram channel earlier this week.
He wrote in the channel, “We will be adding a video dimension to our voice chats in May, making Telegram a powerful platform for group video calls.” It seems the new video tools will be built on top of the group voice chats feature. With these new changes, Telegram will be an all-in-one messaging app with capabilities from screen sharing and encryption to noise cancellation. Note that the app is also available on desktop and tablet.
According to the CEO, Telegram’s new feature will include “everything you can expect from a modern video conferencing tool but with Telegram-level UI, speed, and encryption.”
Due to the coronavirus outbreak, video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet became too much popular within every year of their launch. Back in April 2020, Telegram announced that it is working on a “secure” group video calling service.
Telegram said, “video calls in 2020 are much like messaging in 2013, either secure or usable, but not both”. At that time, Zoom was facing a hard time as it was facing several privacy and security concerns. So Telegram’ simply took a dig at Zoom by saying those.
At that time, Zoom was not secured by end-to-end encryption (e2ee). On the other hand, Telegram focused on security from the start. Telegram launched one-to-one video calls in August 2020. Those have arrived with end-to-end encryption security at launch.
It should be noted that Durov’s recent comments also used the term “encryption” repeatedly. It seems, the company is trying to reiterate its security-focused policy. However, it should be noted that the message doesn’t specifically mention end-to-end encryption.
As of now, it is not clear whether the company will use the same MTProto encryption it uses for one-to-one video calls or deliver something else. MTProto encryption is a custom-designed encryption protocol that very few experts are aware of. Now, Zoom also offers end-to-end encryption.
He wrote, “To make them (web apps) 100% complete in features, we are currently testing a functional version of web-based video calls internally, which will be added soon.”
