One very useful feature request would be to allow a bridge to Zoom. There are two important use-cases: 1, “concert like” broadcasts; 2, novice users.
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concert like broadcasts. A common scenario is a choir/music group wants to share their work with a very broad audience. Obviously the audience doesn’t need to join Flock. Also, most audiences are familiar with joining Zoom, but unfamiliar with Flock. They won’t download it, etc. Also, audiences don’t need to “speak”, they only need to listen. And, finally, they don’t care about latency, they just want fidelity. So, you could have a Zoom bridge with a huge buffer (multiple seconds) that simply consolidates the audio stream (corrects it?) and sent it out to Zoom. The choir director would join the Zoom, and Flock server (hosted on AWS
) would join as a participant. Then the choir director would mute everyone except the “Flock user”, which would be the entire choir. -
Novice users. It is always difficult with these high fidelity audio sharing tools to get novice users to join correctly. That said, it’s easy for them to join Zoom. If you could bridge to Zoom easily, then these users could sing along with the choir. The key would be that you wouldn’t allow the sound BACK from the zoom to the choir. They would sing along “listen only.” I think it would be useful to allow, in this scenario, a limited ability to share audio back to the choir. So if the choir director could “unmute” the zoom link, they could "speak back to the choir. This would be for sharing feedback or instructions, questions, etc. As above, latency and quality expectations would be low because the zoom participants would not be sharing singing audio back to the choir (just from the choir to them) except in the case of speaking.
The key in both of these cases is to make it dumb-easy to have Flock “join” the zoom. I could imagine entering the zoom meeting number, and password, and Flock joins the zoom as a participant. I would suggest not trying to bridge the audio on one of the client machines, but rather do it centrally. Its hard to be a participant in the choir AND be the bridge to zoom.
