Google Rolls Out Free Access To Advanced Hangouts Meet Features

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To help employees, educators, and students stay connected as COVID-19 spreads, Google is providing free access to advanced video-conferencing capabilities in Hangouts Meet.

As more and more people around the world stay at home and work, study, and learn remotely in response to the spread of the Coronavirus, some may find the tools they already use somewhat limiting at times.

G Suite and G Suite for Education are two productivity suites that help businesses, educators, and students, collaborate more effectively – no matter where they’re located – and Google says hundreds of thousands of people use Hangouts Meet and Google Classroom to do this.

To help them stay connected and be as productive as possible, Google has announced it is starting to roll out free access to its advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities.

The rollout affects all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally.

Google is giving all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers free enterprise-level features in Hangouts Meet until July 1, 2020.

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The features were usually only available in G Suite’s Enterprise edition and G Suite Enterprise for Education, but they will now be available for free to all customers until July 1, 2020.

These capabilities include:

Larger meetings, for up to 250 participants per call
Live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain
The ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive

To get started, visit Google’s learning center page, or just follow the instructions sent to you if you are a G Suite admin.

Further to the above, Google also says it will continue to scale its infrastructure to support the sudden increase in demand for Hangouts Meet, and ensure “streamlined, reliable access to the service throughout this period.”