Zoom announces all-in-one events platform

The booming video communications firm Zoom today announced that it would make Zoom Events, an all-in-one platform for virtual experiences, available this summer. Combining Zoom meetings, chat, and video webinars, the platform is intended to be a comprehensive solution for staging ticketed virtual events for internal and external audiences.

What it does. The platform will cater for events of all sizes, from large user conferences to the kind of small-scale, monetizable immersive experiences which had been using OnZoom. It will allow the management of ticketing, billing and access from a single portal, and will track registration, attendance and revenue.

Dig deeper: Events of the future will be hybrid and always-on

Virtual forever. A recent global survey by Zoom found that “a large majority of those surveyed believe that even after COVID-19 concerns subside, video communications are here to stay.” 80% of U.S. respondents expect events to continue to have a virtual element, while 52% expect to attend events both in-person and virtually.

The latest results from our own survey, the Event Participation Index, showed that no less than 92% of respondents believe organizers should continue to offer virtual events even after in-person events have returned.

Dig deeper: Virtual events: What we’ve learned

Why we care. Everyone is trying to forecast the future of events, and everyone we’ve spoken to believes they will have a virtual component, and that pure virtual events will have a strong after-life even once the pandemic is under control. Zoom already rode the wave of remote video communications to great effect, and it’s now trying to catch the next big wave.

MarTech’s Marc Sirkin breaks down digital event strategy in a detailed three-part series