Discord has already taken a few steps to help people stay connected during The Quarantine, but with its latest update, Discord may have just given gamers a true replacement for competing video chat apps like Zoom, Hangouts, and others.
In an update that is available today on desktop, web browsers, and iOS (with Android coming soon), Discord is bolstering its video chat capabilities through the addition of Server Video, the ability to drop in and out of a video call just by hitting a button while in any Discord voice channel. While Discord has included a video chat function since 2017, previously you needed to create specific chat groups for every call.
However, with the new Server Video update, turning on a video chat is as simple as tapping a single button, which means you don’t have to sort through all your direct messages or repeatedly add different contacts to various group chats to get all your friends on the same call. On top of that, thanks to the update, Discord now allows you to share your webcam and your Go Live gameplay feed simultaneously, so if you want to stream what’s on your computer and show your face, you can do that too.
In a recent post on the Discord Blog, the company says it had been wanting to improve its video chat functionality for a long time, and when the pandemic hit and forced people to say indoors, it decided to prioritise its Server Video feature to help speed up its release.
Alongside the new Server Video feature, Discord also announced official support for Discord on Safari on macOS, so you don’t need to install the standard desktop app. And if that wasn’t enough, Discord also released a few quality-of-life improvements including improved video chat performance in Discord’s web app on Chrome that removes the need to download Discord’s dedicated Chrome extension.
So while Discord’s main goal of helping gamers stay connected means Server Video probably isn’t a great choice for your next work meeting, for everything else, Discord is quickly becoming a great communication service for both gamers and non-gamers alike.