Google Meet delivers

Meet. © Google.

At a time when Zoom is serving more than 200 million daily meeting participants and Teams collaboration software has jumped from 32 to 44 million active users, Google will be extending free access to some advanced features in its teleconferencing service, Google Meet, to September 30th (previously July 1st). Meet is seeing a huge surge in usage as families, students, and workers are forced to stay home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Google is letting all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers host meetings via Meet with up to 250 participants, live-stream to up to 100,000 people within a single domain, and save meeting recordings to Google Drive. These features are typically only available to people on the “enterprise” tier of G Suite, which costs $25 per user per month. Javier Soltero, vice president and general manager of G Suite, said that “…as a company we look to helpfulness as a guiding principle.” Google Meet is the rebranded name of Hangouts Meet.

⇨ The Verge, Jay Peters, “Google extends free access to advanced teleconferencing features to September 30th.”