Zoom’s latest acquisition enhances professional meetings

Zoom has acquired the Zoom-based broadcast tools created by the startup Liminal, along with two of the company’s co-founders, the videoconferencing platform announced on Monday.

Liminal’s add-ons, ZoomOSC and ZoomISO, are built for creating professional virtual events, which Zoom will likely natively integrate into its software as part of the acquisition.

As noted on Liminal’s site, ZoomOSC is designed to enhance professional meetings and events using the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol, enabling you to integrate Zoom with third-party software, hardware controllers, and media servers.

At the same time, ZoomISO allows you to export each participants’ video feed as a separate output to professional production hardware, five of which you can choose to output in HD.

By acquiring these assets from Liminal, Zoom says it will help the platform “bridge” the gap between “emerging” and “traditional” forms of event control tools, which should come in handy for broadcast studios, theaters, and other organizations that want to create professional streams.

In addition, the platform focused on large-scale virtual events when it first announced its Events feature in May and officially rolled it out in July. With Events, organizers can create event hubs, sell tickets, and create multiple livestream sessions throughout the day.

On her side, Zoom spokesperson Candace Dean said that Liminal’s existing tools will remain available through Liminal’s site, however, as Zoom expands on those tools and builds something similar into the platform, there will no longer be a need for them as separate add-ons.

There is no specific date or way to when Zoom plans on integrating the features from Liminal, and it’s also unclear whether Liminal’s Zoom add-ons will still be available separately from Zoom when the integration does take place.

It is worth mentioning that Zoom generated $2.6 billion revenue in 2020, a 317 percent increase year-on-year, according to Business of Apps.

“Zoom was one of the fastest growing apps of the pandemic, with meeting participants increasing by 2900 percent,” it added.

Last but not least, Zoom had become a unicorn by January 2017, reaching a valuation of $1 billion, as kingmakers Sequoia Capital invested $100 million. This climbed to just short of $16 billion as the company went public in April 2019.