hipchat cloud disable video

[Jason Perry]

Hi, I know that you cannot disable video conferencing within HipChat cloud, however are there any plans to add that functionality for teams or organizations?

Thanks,

Jason

[Christopher Rivers]

Hi Jason - I'm not quite sure exactly what you're looking for. What do you mean by "teams or organizations"? If/when we add an option to disable video conferencing, it would probably work as a group-wide option (i.e. nobody within the organization would be able to use it).

[Jason Perry]

Hi Chris,

That would work for us as well (cloud option).  The reason is we love the chat portion of it, however some of our offices don’t have the bandwidth to support multi person video chat. 

For example, we may have a meeting with 8-10 people.  5 of those people are here in our Boston office where we only have 20 Mbps up/down.  That meeting alone crushes our office bandwidth and makes the video chat almost useless.  We’re looking into options to upgrade our bandwidth but until then we’d like the ability to limit video chat.  Unless there is a way to change the frame rate or resolution to decrease the bandwidth within the global settings or the client.

Thanks for responding.

Jason Perry

[Christopher Rivers]

Thanks for the details, I'll add a more "answer-like" response below then 

[Christopher Rivers]

Currently, we don't have the option to disable video chat for a group entirely. If/when we add such an option, it will probably be for the group as a whole, not for specific users / teams within the organization. Add that setting isn't on our roadmap right now, however.

One thing you might try to save bandwidth is to have people turn off their video when joining a call. This will limit the streams between clients to only audio, which is a much smaller amount of data to send back and forth. We hope to include an option to initiate audio-only calls in the future as well, but don't yet have a timeframe for that.