Every month Code for Boston has a core team meeting. While most of our team attends in person, sometimes people have to participate remotely. We have found Zoom to be the best software for doing this. However for remote participants the view of the meeting room ends up being limited to the person who connects. The audio is fine using the Polycom, but video is not great.

Enter MeetingOwl Pro. One of our members brought in a unit last night and it is fantastic. Setup is simple: plug it into your laptop and AC power and place it in the center of your table. Zoom will then let you select the MeetingOwl as a video and audio source. From there the device projects a panoramic view of the meeting room on the top of its video feed and more zoomed in views of who is talking below it. Game changer.

As a local participant I can mostly review that part of the experience. The audio coming in an out of the MeetingOwl was superior to the phone connection we used with our Polycom. The speaker projected the sound wider and more clearly than Polycom. The remote party had no issue hearing any of our thoughts and comments. Finally we can take advantage of the Internet audio feature in Zoom.

If you have small to medium sized meetings with remote participants I recommend trying a MeetingOwl. It makes it so that remote participants can see as well as hear most of the people in the meeting room. The video quality is good and audio works great. Faceless conference calls should be a thing of the past.