 If you're looking for a cost-effective alternative to zoom then you may want to check out vivo meetings and in this video I'm going to be giving you an introduction to the platform talking about its features its functionality and Running through some of the settings as well so that you can get the most out of it It's not going to be a complete full tutorial However, it should give you enough of an idea to decide if it's something that you want to check out for yourself And of course if you do you'll find a link to get a free trial down in the description Now before we get into it I do need to say right off the bat that this is a sponsored video paid for by vivo meetings However, all the views that I'm going to be expressing in here are my own and as you'll see I'm going to be sharing just the The basics and the the the facts of you know what it can do and what it can't do sharing the pros and cons as well And who it's right for and who maybe it's not going to be right for as well So with that said let's just dive straight in shall we and I'll start with giving you a very brief introduction to the interface We'll come back to this a little bit later But this is just to illustrate the fact that we are talking about a meeting platform So it's going to have all the usual things that you would expect to see We've got the bar down at the bottom here where you can do things like activate breakout rooms We've got the recording streaming as well. I'll come back to that. It's grayed out in here It's not activated on this particular call that I've got running. We've got a whiteboard built-in screen sharing obviously muting Mike Choosing the microphone and the camera settings down at the bottom there as well Then we've got things like raising hands and so on so interactivity with Participants and then you've got the usual things here So we've got a participants window that pops out a chat window as well and a place for polls as well and a place Obviously to invite people to the meeting as well So all of this is just to give a brief introduction to say that you know It's basically a meeting platform as you will be familiar with in many cases. They're so ubiquitous these days We've also got different views here. So you can have a sidebar view Bottom bar view and a few different layouts, but we'll come back to those in a moment before we actually get into the interface Though I do just want to run through some of these settings and maybe just touch on as well Why I'm actually, you know engaged in this collaboration Why it was something that I was interested to take on because I do get approached quite often by companies asking if I want to test stuff out whether it's software hardware or Platforms or whatever and I don't normally take people up on these these offers however in this case I was quite compelled to check out vivo meetings just because it happened to come at around the time There was a lot of discussion around zoom alternatives in amongst the members of the take one tech Academy And we've just been having conversations around Basically alternatives for zoom webinar Then also looking at ways to get transcripts out of zoom and a few other different options and talking about the cost of zoom When you start adding in multiple different add-ons it can become quite a large monthly expense So it was just sort of top of mind as at the time that I was approached by vivo And so I thought well, let me just check it out then and as I say I was quite pleasantly surprised by what I found there was also another feature that was really compelling to me, which was around the Resolution of the camera feed that you get because there is this issue when you are using virtual cameras from Platforms like e-cam live to go into zoom So just to explain what that is if you are new to the channel You don't know then all of my videos are made in one take with no edits using e-cam live E-cam live is basically a live video production software There is another software called OBS which is cross-platform for Mac and PC But what this allows me to do is do things like you know switch over to this scene This is just me pressing a button on my desk switches over to this scene I could switch over to a different camera angle if I wanted here we go It would help if that was in focus, but you get the idea I can switch back and forth between these things and do all of that live Well, if you want to do that into your meetings as well Then you can use what's called a virtual camera and that's fine when you are just using your camera going into the platform But sometimes if you've got writing on the screen like if I go over to my scene with the settings here If you wanted all of this to be read on the screen in your virtual meeting Then sometimes what zoom does is it degrades the resolution because it doesn't really realize that you're trying to share your screen It's just thinking that it is a camera And is this common issue that if you're in the e-cam live Facebook group then there's this common question that comes up all the time about resolution in zoom So one of the things that I was attractive to me about vivo meetings Is the fact that it has got this little toggle to allow you personally to just pick the resolution you want And I'll come into some limitations of that a little bit later on But that was also another compelling reason for me to take a look at this So with that said I'm going to go through some of these settings because as I started looking at some of the other features There was a number of other things in here that I thought are really neat Implementations that are just great from a meeting point of view. So let's just start then with going through some of these settings And by the way, this is another common thing that I get When people book coaching calls with me is, you know, where how do I turn this thing on or off in zoom? And certainly zoom settings have become quite bloated these days So it's good to have a much more simpler sort of effect simpler list I should say of of settings in here So I won't go through all of these as I say This is not intended to be a full tutorial But basically when you log into your Vivo meetings account on the desktop or indeed on the web The settings are going to look the the same there And you've got all the usual stuff here, you know, two-factor authentication, timezone, notifications, account settings I should say that when you go into each of these, you know, it's not just lists and lists of stuff They're all contained pretty much, you know, within the space of this small window So you're not overwhelmed with settings, but I'm going to start here though with audio and video settings Exactly what you'd expect. So we've got the microphone input I've got my roadcaster set there. You can see that as I'm talking the levels going up and down We've also got the speaker there So you can just select those just as you would you select your mic and speak it in other platforms We've also got noise cancelling. It's very easy to turn that on and off another thing too I've you know, I've got to keep relating this back to zoom because this is you know, the obvious comparison the zoom audio Settings are also something that are becoming a little bit more extensive these days And that is on the one hand potentially a good thing on the other hand. It can lead to confusion I would say 90% of calls that are booked with me when people book a consultation is generally audio issues Rather than video or anything like that and it is because of the complications that come with with audio so here you've got the option to just toggle on or off noise cancellation and Filter out the background noise I personally leave that off because I just manage all this in my studio space with my roadcaster and my audio setup Next you've got this option to toggle on to hold down the space to temporarily unmute again common with other platforms as well But this is where you just activate this and then you've simply got this option here to Either flip your display or have it the the way that everyone else will see it So I always have this one checked. I just want to see it as everyone else is going to see it I'm used to looking at myself in the in the screen, you know when I'm making videos and so on So I prefer to just have it looking like that some people prefer to have it sort of flipped so that it is effectively a Mirror image so that it's more familiar. It looks like they're looking in a mirror. I prefer to leave that just like that Now one thing you can do in here is change the camera And you'll notice that I've got my e-cam live virtual camera So if you are an e-cam live user and if you are on the current beta Then for sure you will have the virtual camera just show up there if you are not yet upgraded and you know this Likely within I would say a few weeks of me making this video The e-cam live virtual camera will just show up in there However, if you are on the regular version of e-cam and you don't see it in there Then I'll leave a link to some Code or I'll leave a snippet of code down in the description Which is something you just need to drop into the into the terminal But actually this is going to be a thing of the past the e-cam live virtual camera will just show up there for everyone Because they've changed the way that the e-cam live virtual camera works But basically when I turn that on you'll see that now basically what you're seeing right here coming out of e-cam is also going into vivo I'm just going to turn that back to the regular camera though. Just so it doesn't get to confusing So next up then we've got virtual backgrounds. I'm going to actually skip those I always just recommend anybody in meetings should not be using virtual backgrounds whether it is in zoom teams vivo meetings or any platform the quality of the Keying out of the background of the person is just not there I always think it's just more of a distraction than anything to have those in if you are going to have a virtual background I'd recommend and you're doing this for a Professionally then you should have a professional green screen and you know like in e-cam live We can just have a professional quality green screen key and then put any virtual background behind us But I tend to just miss them out all together on the the actual meeting platforms themselves. That said if you do go into here You're gonna have you know similar things. You can upload your own to them But yeah, I prefer to just give those a miss myself Next up we've got some meeting mode here So this is a really nice feature nearly skipped right over there But this meeting mode is one thing that I think is a great feature in here because I always talk about the sort of process that you go through when you are setting up a meeting and Then when people join a meeting and the different levels of access you might want people to have to chat for example You know if it's a meeting where everyone knows each other Then yes, it's fine for everyone to be able to go in the group chat maybe DM each other as well However, if you're doing a public event where it is people who potentially are complete strangers You don't want them to just be able to Direct message message people who happen to be in the meeting as well There's a whole load of sort of privacy concerns and things like that Around that one of the things that I like about here though is we've got these four distinct modes And so let's just go through these because it's a really great way of setting up meetings So that you know the sort of format of them in advance So if I go into this one, we've got the first type which is Conversation collaboration mode basically this is what you're going to consider as you know a regular meeting that you would have Been used to scheduling always so ideal for smaller groups team meetings daily stand-ups and so on so basically this is the critical thing here All participants can be heard joining the meeting Unmuted as a default all participants have full access to turn on their webcam. They can share their screen They can upload a document present a document use whiteboard and use text chat So basically it's a regular meeting anyone can do everything obviously as the host you have control over this But basically that's the sort of default the next one though is this classroom and Q&A mode And this is a slight different. We've got slightly different permissions here So although all participants can join the meeting they're muted when they come in as a default Which is you know how I always recommend setting up your meetings and all participants have access to they can activate their How their webcam and they can raise their hand and but only moderators will be able to share their screen Upload and download a document Present and navigate through a document and use the whiteboard and use the text chat So it's just a different level of permissions whether you are you know one of the and by the way the moderators are What you would consider to be co-hosts. So you've got host and co-host they call co-hosts moderators Which actually makes a lot of sense from a terminology point of view So you can just see that it's more set up for a Q&A and a classroom Setup the next one then is present presentation and webinar mode So already we're sort of bridging this gap between a meeting and a webinar because webinars are just built into vivo meetings It's not like other platforms the like where you have to have this as an add-on It is just built into there There are some limitations which we'll come on to but yeah here basically when you are in presentation or webinar mode The waiting room is active the meeting will not begin until the moderated joins and by the way You can tweak all of these settings on a meeting by meeting basis as well, but these are just some presets all Participants may join the meeting and they're all muted and they cannot unmute themselves So just like in a regular webinar people come into the meeting, but they can't can't unmute themselves They're non Vocal should we say and then we have the the there's no announcements So there's no audio that comes through and only the moderators or the host the co-host We'll be able to activate their webcam share their screen and do everything. It's basically a webinar mode The last one then is this one that is called focus mode and this is slightly different. So the features are all Participants can come in they can't unmute themselves They do have access to activate their webcam and raise their hand But only moderators will be able to share the screen upload a document and use the white the whiteboard and so on chat mode So the participants can only chat with the moderators So that is somewhere sort of in between I guess a webinar and the sort of classroom So just a slightly different level What's really great though is although you've got these presets and you can go in and make adjustments to this When you set up your meeting you can specify what type of meeting it is The great thing though is that you can actually just switch the type of meeting part way through Which means that rather than having to go through and you know toggle on a load of different settings on or off or whatever You could start in a webinar mode Let's say you want to do a workshop where you're doing a main presentation And then you're switching into a Q&A section afterwards Well, you could start out in webinar on presentation mode and then you know part way through After you finish the bulk of the content Maybe you want to switch it into a classroom mode where people can then come on camera and start asking questions And so I just really like this feature because it has got this idea of these distinct modes And also, of course, this is something that's not possible in Zoom is to start with a webinar and then migrate it over to a regular Meeting whereas in here you can just make that switch. So I really liked that as a feature I'll just quickly jump through some of these other ones So we've got a waiting room. You can have old music in the waiting room as well So if you want to add that in although I think that is one of the pro features You can decide whether you want to have people, you know the the chimes the sound effects when people come in or not And then you've also got this separate option here for a moderator pin. So this is when a Co-host is going to join the meeting you can have them join with a separate pin rather than having the meeting open to everyone They can just get themselves in and some other things here. I'll come to recording and live streaming So I mentioned this earlier. There is an option to stream so you can stream to YouTube You can actually stream to the vivo meetings platform itself and then embed that on your site And then you can also stream to any RTMP key So if you've got the RTMP URL and the stream key you can drop that in so you could technically be streaming from here to anywhere as well They've also got different layout options, which are very clear You'll notice but as well as I've been going through here, you know whilst we've got this list on the side This is the extent of the settings and as we've been going into each one You'll notice there isn't a big huge long list So it is actually very easy to go through these settings and just see exactly what's what and you're never really going to get lost In terms of where something is activated from Now if we look at the recording layout options, it's very easy to select these you can also do it during the meeting as well We've got the preferred layout for audio and video recordings and live streams. So we've got gallery view We've got the speaker down Speaker in the the side there and then the gallery down the left hand side or the speaker only And then preferred recording and streaming layout when someone is presenting So if you're you know, somebody's on spotlight or presenting a screen share or whatever Then you've got a few different options there as well So you can just choose how you want this to be But what we'll see is you can also change that during the meeting as well So those are just a few of the settings, but I mentioned this thing about resolution and this was over in here in audio Here is it's just flicked out my camera. Let me just put that back to the other one for a second Here's where you're going to set your your actual camera But if I come over into the meeting and I'll show you this specific resolution Toggle that I was talking about so let's go back over into the meeting because a lot of the things that I've just talked about there You're going to see in here as well. So for example If I come down to Where are we down here? The more we've got some settings in here So if I click on settings Then it's going to bring up some settings for this meeting itself And this is going to look very similar because now you can see that we've got that camera So I can change the camera for this specific meeting We've got the same things with the Rocaster there the chat message notifications is an additional one That's in here that you can toggle on but you can also then see we've got this option for resolution And this is where you can change this from standard definition to HD 720p to full HD 1080p and this is the feature that as I say I just really like the fact that it is so easy. It's so clear You don't need to be on a specific path plan with vivo meetings to activate this It is available to everyone. There is one thing to say about this though You're always going to be at the mercy of your internet connection And so it's whilst it is, you know a feature that you can turn on or off just as you know Your audio signal could be lost. So can your resolution be degraded by a poor internet connection? So it's not going to mean that you're going to get this guaranteed resolution regardless You know, even if you are on dial-up or something like that But it is something that you're in control of as I say and this is something that is different to zoom where you have to Go through all of these little hoops to to activate the group HD as it's called But even then if you're not doing certain other things like having your your zoom window in full screen and so on There's all these other little hoops that you have to do to have to jump through to get it to activate So I will just say though that once again, you know, it's not a guaranteed It's basically going to be dependent on resolution and so on but that is just something that I like But also in this settings here. I've talked about virtual backgrounds. I'm going to skip over that But here is where we've got the meeting mode and this is where you can simply switch between those different modes So at the moment, we've just started this in a regular conversation and collaboration mode But let's say that I wanted to switch this up and make it into a webinar Well, I would be able to just click on that there and then click on save and then suddenly now You'll see that I've gone full screen because we are now in webinar mode And now when I look at my other devices that are also logged into this meeting I'm basically front and center for them because we've now switched this up into a webinar Let's say that we've done the webinar portion now and we want to go back to a regular meeting So maybe we're going to go to classroom mode so we can click in there I think that's a great feature to just be able to switch in and out from from one to the other like that If we were if I did have streaming activated, I didn't activate it here But we would be able to control that from there. We've got recording There is also AI transcripts on the highest tier. I'll talk about the tiers in a moment But there when you record as well as getting the recording, you also get a transcript Plus an AI generated meeting summary as well One other thing about sharing, I like the fact that you can share your screen Obviously in the same way that you're used to but they've also made it really easy to share an additional camera So if you want to just add in one of your other cameras, you can just come and grab one of them I'm probably going to share the wrong one, but I'll just pick any one of these. How about how about this one? Let's just try We'll see which one. Well, that's my facecam, isn't it? So there you go If less, I mean probably wouldn't have the exact same shot But you can see that I'm just bringing in another camera So it might be you want to use like a top-down shot or a different angle or whatever But nice to just be able to quickly and easily add in that extra camera angle if you wanted to Obviously personally, I would do all that with with e-cam and just set up my scenes accordingly The other thing then is in the camera, you can obviously turn your camera on and off I like the fact that when you do choose your camera, it does actually pull in a preview of all of them So you can see, you know, which camera it is that you want to select I want to select. Let's go back to this one And then you've also got things like reactions and so on as I say, this is all pretty self-explanatory If I go into the participants, you'll see that you've got the more next to each one So you can pin somebody. You can also spotlight. If I click spotlight, I'm now on spotlight for everyone So I can see that I'm full screen over there for them I could spotlight somebody else You can also take somebody into a one-on-one meeting So if you were a moderator or a co-host, you know, if somebody was having technical difficulty Then you could just click on that person and just pull them straight into a one-on-one meeting I won't demonstrate that right now, but that's what that's going to do Or you can send it onto a waiting room or just remove them like that All fairly standard stuff really and then you've got the chat function and you can choose here Who can chat with who now that thing of those different meeting types This is where it's just going to apply these presets So for example, I would recommend if you're in a public meeting where you all know one another Then it's fine for everybody to be able to chat with everybody However, if you're in a more public setting where, you know, maybe people have just joined They don't know each other You don't really want people to be able to DM each other Because people might just be getting unwanted attention that way So you can change those in here And as I say, these are part of these broader, you know, four different meeting type presets But you can always go in and change these yourself. So again, and just a nice little feature there Then a couple of other things. We've got the different views here that we've already talked about It's actually put me in spotlights So what I'll do is I'll just come back to this one and you can see that that little crown there If I just tap on that, it's going to remove the spotlight from me and I'll close this down I said I'll talk about some of the pros and cons and one thing that I will say as a, you know This may or may not be an issue for you But there is just sort of one primary window There isn't an option to have a completely separate window like you have with zoom That's something that I do actually use quite heavily. So when I'm doing virtual webinars and workshops I do this thing which is really a non-standard practice, but I will pin a person to a second window in zoom and then I'll kind of use a screen share to pull them out of that Bring them back into ecam and then feed that back into the zoom. So that's something that's technically not quite possible with this So, uh, yeah If that is something that is of interest to you or that you do need to do is to have, you know Two separate windows and then you can't quite quite do that with this But the other views though, we've got the different gallery view you can show yourself or hide yourself So hide self view. This is the equivalent of that if I turn that one off You can see that you just disappear You don't want to be watching yourself and then you can change the page size So you control how many people are in the actual in the frame so the maximum being 25 But if you've got, you know a smaller group, you can adjust that And then you can also just come into here have the this one with the the main speaker view And the the gallery down the side or the gallery down at the bottom of that There is full screen view there as well now as I said at the beginning This isn't going to be a complete full tutorial But hopefully this is just giving you a bit of an insight and you can see It's pretty user friendly if you've used any other meeting platform before then This is not certainly going to be a huge departure from that And you will have seen also from the settings fairly intuitive to go through those as well As I say, you can find a link in the description to go and try it out But obviously you're going to want to know more about the pricing So let's take a look at that shall we and if you go over to their website using that link in the description Click on the pricing section Then you will be able to see the different tiers that are available By the way, there are some monthly tiers, but and you can obviously go annual as well But do check out the lifetime deals as well So clicking on here is going to give you a number of options where it's basically just one payment for lifetime access So certainly go ahead and look at those as well. But let's just go back to the regular And plans that they've got here as well If you think about this compared to you know zoom, then this is going from basically 250 a month up to 18 dollars a month Which actually when you look at the 18 dollar a month package For all that you get for that is very cost effective compared to you know, a regular zoom plan Never mind, you know, how cost effective these are at just 250 a month for this lower level plan And I talked about, you know, who this is right for and who it isn't right for Well, if we take a look at for example, the basic plan In fact, let's just go and look at you can find up here. There is or further down actually, sorry full plan comparison It's worth taking a look at this more in-depth look here And let me just zoom in this for you. If you look at the Participant capacity for example on the basic plan. Well, it's 12 people maximum Now, of course that might not work if you're in you've got big teams But actually if all you're doing is, you know, one-on-one coaching calls or maybe small group calls or whatever Then a 12 participant max is actually going to be fine. So that's what you get on that 250 a month plan And then up to pro you've got 300 participants. Let's look at what these different things are here So includes webinar. So the webinar feature is available on all of those plans Lots of ticks here across all of them. So they're pretty consistent here So I'm just going to go down not much differentiation File transfer not available on the basic, but it is on the others So if you want to be able to upload files, then that is another little Difference there custom hold music if that's important to you That's on only the plus and the pro plans coming down a bit further This is an important one potentially for you AI transcription. That is a pro feature And then coming down for enhanced security options. That's basically end-to-end encryption that is on the plus and the pro I would probably argue that those are, you know, essentials So I'd be looking at one of these two plans myself personally And then the custom branding as well is a way that when you send out your links, you know It can have your logo and things like that on it as well And then the other thing was the streaming services. So youtube streaming is plus and pro plan only User management and not that one. Sorry. I'm reading the wrong line this one Live streaming to up to 10,000 participants. That is the one where it is going basically to their Vivo meetings portal and then you can embed that On your site. That is a pro feature As is the the drive storage Recording is available on plus and pro So for me personally, I think the the plus upwards Is the most compelling package and then it's really just a case of whether you need those added features Of the live streaming and AI transcripts as to whether you go to the the pro Level package, but just once again the pricing of those is as on their website They do also run offers from time to time as well and certainly definitely check out Those lifetime deals as well because that could be a very cost effective way to get this on a as a long-term A long-term solution with no ongoing monthly cost So I hope you found that interesting and useful and if you do want to check it out Then be sure to use the link that is in the description I'll leave a link to some other videos related to online meetings and their tech mastery over there on the right hand side Thanks as always to my channel members as well. I really appreciate your support. Have a great day everyone and I'll see you next time