ooVoo

» see oovoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

oovoo was a us-high-school product. the people who used it were american teenagers who needed a way to do a five-person group video call in 2013 without paying skype premium. in turkey the messenger layer was msn and then skype, with whatsapp displacing both once android phones got cheap. oovoo did not feature in any of those windows. it was the kind of app you knew about because someone you knew was on it for a semester and then was not.

the company was founded in 2006 by philippe schwartz and clay mathile, with the public app shipping in 2007. the differentiating feature was group video. skype's free tier did one-to-one calls while oovoo did up to twelve in a single call, on every platform that mattered, including a facebook app embed. for a few years that was a real competitive advantage. for a few more years it was a feature that other apps shipped for free, and oovoo had to live on premium upgrades and ads.

peak registered users hit somewhere over a hundred million per the press releases of the era, with the actual monthly active number much smaller. the demographic concentration was the part that mattered. us high schoolers between roughly 2012 and 2015 were running oovoo on android phones and on the laptops their schools issued, for after-school study sessions and homework calls. it was a real-cohort product with a real-cohort decline curve. by 2017 the cohort had moved to instagram dms and snapchat video.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the early years collected awards. pc magazine called oovoo a software innovation best-in-show in 2007, and webware honored it in 2008. ces gave it an innovation award as late as 2016. these are the kinds of awards you win when you have a feature nobody else ships yet. that window was 2007 to 2011. after that group video was a feature on every other messenger, and oovoo had to compete on brand instead of capability, which is a hard sell to teenagers.

~ the funny part ~

oovoo was popular in a way that is almost impossible to surface in a 2026 search. youtube videos about it from 2013 have a few thousand views. the brand left no public artifacts that survived the shutdown. but if you went to a high school in pennsylvania or ohio in 2014 you knew exactly what it was and you probably had an account, with eight people on a five-person call because somebody's friend had joined and would not leave.

~ how it ended ~

krush technologies posted the shutdown notice on twitter in november 2017. the official cited reason was that the platform was not profitable enough to justify continued operation. that was a fair statement. by 2017 facetime had been free on every iphone for six years and whatsapp had launched video calls. instagram added video chat in the same window. there was no remaining feature gap for oovoo to fill, and the brand recognition with the original teenage cohort had not transferred to the next one.

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