Meta is killing consumer version of Portals

When Meta (then Facebook) first launched its smart display, Portals, back in 2018, it pitched it as a ‘video calling device to connect you with your friends and family.’ Now, three years and one iteration later, the company has reportedly shelved its plans of making the device available to consumers at large.

According to a report by The Information (via The Verge), Meta has decided to stop making Portals for consumers to focus on business use cases, such as making conference calls, only. As per a report by The Variety, Meta will sell the remaining inventory of its smart display. It will also continue providing support to all its existing customers. However, going forward, the company will focus on business applications instead of developing features for consumers at large.

The change happened after the Meta Portal, which was earlier called Facebook Portal, gained popularity among businesses that were looking for devices that offer better collaboration among employees working from amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It comes at a time when the company is reassessing its hardware plans amid concerns by the investors over spending millions of dollars over projects that are financially viable yet.

It is worth noting that Meta’s Portals never gained much traction among consumers, especially when compared to Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays and Google’s Nest Hub smart displays. Meta launched Portals at a time when the company was still dealing with the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had raised security concerns among the users. To add to that, at the time of launch, Portals had limited functionality, which reduced its prospects drastically. Over time, the company did add more features to it, which includes support for streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video, SHOWTIME, Netflix, and SLING TV, and video conferencing apps such as Zoom, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, and Webex among others. However, these features failed to make a dent in the company’s dwindling popularity.

Meta, as per a report by Engadget, sold 600,000 Portal devices in 2020 and 800,000 in 2021, which further confirms that the device failed to take off among consumers at consumers at large. Perhaps, this is the reason why the company has decided to shift its focus to business use cases, an area where it managed to gain some stronghold amid the pandemic.

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