Nothing beats talking face-to-face for efficient communication and bringing the team closer together. This is a challenge for modern organizations with remote teams, home offices, mobile workforce, and external collaborators.

The addition of group video calls gives organizations a GDPR-ready solution for all the internal and external communication that is protected with an open source and independently audited encryption protocol.

“With the addition of video conferencing, Wire overtakes consumer apps by offering top-of-the line security, consumer-grade user experience, combined with the control and compliance of an enterprise solution.” — Morten Brøgger

Video conferencing is an exclusive feature for Wire business accounts.

Upgrade Wire on mobile and desktop to start your first group video call.

One solution, one security for internal and external collaboration

Recently we have seen companies tackling their own internal struggles with non-compliant shadow IT in the wake of GDPR. We’re working hard to make Wire the best platform for all day-to-day communication at work.

The launch of secure guest rooms in April was the cornerstone making it easy to include external partners in specific project conversations. Guest rooms support all Wire features.

The addition of video conferencing means there’s another feature and use case now covered by Wire and its independently audited end-to-end encryption.

The creator of the video group call must be part of a team account, but participants can join using free, personal accounts, or as guests directly in their web browser with nothing to download or install.

Overcoming the technical challenges

Implementing end-to-end encrypted video conferencing has significant technical challenges. The video stream for each participant is separately encrypted with its own unique encryption key and then sent to a specific conference participant.

This increases CPU workload, which in turn affects battery usage. Separate video streams between each participant means higher bandwidth requirements for sending and receiving video streams.

Hiding the complexity from the users while preserving the security that Wire has become known for was no easy task. To guarantee an excellent experience we’ve limited the maximum number of participants to four while we continue to invest time into optimizing performance to increase the limit.

Group video calls are end-to-end encrypted, use the VP8 codec, QVGA at 15 fps. Calls requires up to 1Mbit/s bandwidth for optimal performance.