@Johanna21 - Have a read of the Video Chat Help Center article.
The Miro video chat only supports up to 25 simultaneous video chat participants.
The person who initiates the video chat will always have a chat bubble in the board, but could still turn their camera off (so the buuble would be black). Then a chat each other of the available chat spots available is assigned in the order that participants click "join".
Everyone has to click the "join" button to join the session, so people just coming to the board won't automatically see the video chat bubbles/be joined in.
My suggestion/tip/thoughts: the Miro video chat is good for a few people only, as a quick convenience. And it definitely won't work for groups larger than 25, so will need to use something else (that everyone is surely more familiar with). Plus, any more than a few chat bubbles in the board becomes clutter.
Some more reasons not to use the Miro Video Chat:
- It does not work in the Windows 10 desktop app from the Microsoft Store (more info here).
- It uses the Vonage communications platform which, from my own personal experience, is blocked on our corporate network, so you may run into participants who will never get it to work while connected to their company’s network.
- The majority of people use Miro in a browser and have other sites open on other tabs. With Miro already using up resources, adding video/audio into the mix will certainly not help with performance.
- While you can do a screen share in a Miro board to have people follow you, you can also do this in 3rd party video conferencing software. However, if you do it in Miro, then then the user is stuck watching you. If you share your screen in Zoom, Teams, Webex, GoToMeeting, Google Meet, etc., then can watch what you are doing while doing their own thing on the Miro board.
- Setting up which camera/mic to use in a browser requires an additional step compared to the aforementioned video conferencing applications - not a nice user experience for those less tech savvy.
I don’t feel bad for not promoting Miro’s video chat as they are a whiteboard platform, not a video chat platform. Again, I have used it a few times to chat with one or two folks while we happened to be on the board at the same time and for that it was convenient and worked fine.
@Robert Johnson thank you for sharing your experiences and your help!