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Hangouts Meet adds live streaming for up to 100K participants

Announced last year, Hangouts Meet is Google’s video conferencing solution for enterprises and larger organizations. Today, the service is adding support for live streams like company-wide meetings and other events where users need to tune in, but not necessarily participate.

Launching before Chat last year, Hangouts Meet has so far allowed users to dial into meetings and collaborate with users across a domain. Google earlier in 2018 began transitioning all G Suite video meetings away from classic Hangouts, which still exists for regular users.

The new ability to live stream is limited to G Suite Enterprise users and requires that organizers enable live streaming on a Calendar meeting and invite participants. It is also available to G Suite Enterprise for Education customers, with free licenses not eligible for recordings or live streaming.

A link will then be generated with each stream supporting 100,000 in-domain users either on the web or mobile device. Visually, watchers will see a video player that is identical to YouTube’s. In the coming weeks, users will be able to watch live streams from dedicated Hangouts Meet hardware.

When ready, meeting participants can start the live stream to allow viewers to watch.

The ability to add live streaming to a meeting can be controlled per organizational unit (OU) from the Admin console. To do this, open the Admin console and go to Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts and click “Meet settings.” Here, toggle “Let people stream their meetings.” This setting is ON by default.

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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com