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The Zoom video conferencing service recently surpassed 300 million daily users. Google Meet (formerly Hangsouts Meet), despite growth of around 3 million users per day, has “only” 100 million users, 30 times more than in January. Now Google will regain Zoom’s leadership in making much of the Meet service available to everyone for free.
For now, Meet has only been available to customers with a G Suite subscription. In other words, everyone has been able to attend video meetings, but only G Suite users have been able to create and organize the meetings.
The free opportunity will be rolled out gradually starting next week.
Full access for months
In the long run, the free version will have some limitations compared to the G Suite version, but that will only apply after September 30. After that, this functionality will be offered through a new scheme called G Suite Essentials. This includes the ability to join phone calls, have conversations over 60 minutes, have more meeting participants, and record video conferences and store them on Google Drive.
A Google account is required to create Meet Video Meetings. This can be done through this page or through appointments in Google Calendar, and as long as you have a relatively modern browser on your PC, you do not need to install any other software. This also applies to smartphones and tablets, but there are separate Google Meet apps for Android and iOS.
Other participants are more easily invited by sharing a URL that is short and hard to guess.
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While Zoom is about to make major changes to the service to make it secure, Google Meet must be designed for security from the start. Google doesn’t even hesitate to recommend it for doctor-patient conversations. But, like most other services, Meet is also not end-to-end encrypted.
How about Hangouts?
In recent years, Google has launched, renamed, and phased out so many messaging and video conferencing services that hardly anyone has an overview.
With today’s news, at least it’s unclear what will happen to Google Hangouts, which offers the same functionality as Meet, but is primarily aimed at consumers.
Hangouts are not mentioned at all in today’s Google blog posts.
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