Google Hangouts Meet is now Google Meet. Google has officially announced the name change and now calls its video conferencing platform Google Meet. Google Meet has seen an explosive increase in users, up to 2 million new users per day, because of the COVID-19 pandemic that forces workplaces to rethink their meetings. Many businesses now rely on video conferencing tools. And Google just made it more attractive to try the rebranded Google Meet, with an offer businesses can’t refuse. Read this article to know more.
Organising video meetings with Google Meet is a breeze, and more and more businesses are discovering this power of easy-to-create and easy-to-join online video conferencing with Google’s video conferencing tool.
In the unprecedented times we’re living in due to the coronavirus pandemic, more and more businesses have no other option than to do teleworking. In-person meetings and events are being replaced with video meetings of all kinds.
Witness of this increase in video conferencing usage are the most recent impressive growth statistics of Google Meet:
- Google Meet now serves 2B minutes of video calls per day around the world. That’s over 3,800 years of secure meetings every single day
- Every day, 2 million new users are using Google Meet
- Over the last few weeks, Google Meet’s day-over-day growth surpassed 60%. As a result, its daily usage is more than 25 times what it was in January. Despite this growth spark, the Google Cloud network handles this increased demand without any problems nor outages
Rebranding to Google Meet
In case you didn’t know, Google Hangouts Meet’s online video conferencing application has been around for many years as a part of Google’s G Suite collaboration suite. Google is now dropping the “Hangouts” from the name, rebranding it to Google Meet. The logo stays the same.
This rebranding will no doubt simplify the confusion that exists since a few years around the naming of Google Cloud applications in G Suite like Google Hangouts Chat, Google Hangouts and Google Hangouts Meet, the latter now becoming a simplified ‘Google Meet’. We wouldn’t be surprised if the other ‘Hangouts’ products will also undergo some changes in the coming months.
The name change was officially announced last week. But unofficially, it was already picked up by attentive tech magazines and news outlets, who noticed the name change earlier. In recent communications, both Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Google CEO Sundar Pichai already referred to the platform as Google Meet. The most concrete indication that a rebranding effort was underway, comes from Google’s support landing page. The video conferencing app was already called Google Meet there, more than a week ago.
For businesses, it’s now more attractive than ever to start using Google Meet as their preferred video conferencing platform, because with this new name launch comes an offer.
Get Google Meet Free Offer
As a Google Cloud Premier partner, we want to do our part to help everyone stay connected and productive with the secure and powerful video conferencing solution that Google Meet is.
That’s why we’re offering free Google Meet with advanced enterprise features to new business and public sector customers until September 30th 2020.
Existing G Suite customers can make use of Google Meet with the additional advanced enterprise features. G Suite admins can simply enable Meet video calling for their organisation, and then turn on live streaming and recording. Find more information about enabling these features for your domain in this article.
Additionally, existing G Suite customers can add additional Google Meet users for free, independently of their G Suite licenses. Without paying for additional G Suite seats, that is. Contact us if you’re interested in this.
For more information about this offer, check out this page.
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Google extends free premium features of Google Meet through September 30
It now announced the extension of its free premium video conferencing features for schools, businesses and organisations through 30th September 2020.
What does this mean?
All companies and schools can make free use of three extended Meet functionalities that are normally only available to users of the ‘”G Suite Enterprise” or “G Suite for Education Enterprise” subscription. The premium features include:
- the ability to live stream for up to 100,000 viewers with a domain
- the ability to record and save meeting recordings to Google Drive
- to invite up to 250 participants to join a meeting per video call
- Enterprise security in Google Meet
These features that Google Meet is currently offering for free, are typically only available to people on the “Enterprise” tier of G Suite, which costs $25 per user per month.
What do you think of the name change? Do you use Google Meet? If you’re interested in recording your meetings, live stream possibilities and if you would like to organise meetings with up to 25O participants, you should take advantage of the new Google Meet offer.
Want to find out more about video conferencing with Google Meet?