Updated: May 5, 2020
August 2017 was the first time I was invited to a Zoom meeting. I was surprised at how well it worked. My experience with remote meetings before that had been Skype meetings and a couple Google hangouts. I soon found that Zoom was the tool most of my teams used when we needed something that wasn't Skype or Microsoft Teams or Facetime. You could get in, set up and have a meeting, without the teeth-grinding travel time but with the face to face communication. I used to dread Skype meetings, Zoom, not so much.
Zoom has been around since 2011 - the same year Microsoft acquired Skype. There are so many people using Zoom right now that they've had to adjust their business model to accommodate the sheer volume. I went to my Dad's house and he was on his cell, having a zoom meeting (in button-down shirt, shorts and flipflops). I'm not a gamer and not familiar with platforms like Twitch and other platforms that are were built to host large numbers of persons in real player games.
Zoom is in use by governments, individuals, schools, private enterprise. The commitment to apparent ease of use - low number of clicks to launch, use across platforms, stable operation and a freemium model is at odds with how challenging it is to do anything other than have a virtual face to face conversation. Their re-interpretation of the meaning of end to end encoding, their hacker mentality - make it work, ignore the protocols...sell information, install like virus-ware...is a case study unfolding in real-time, virtually. Conversation by conversation.