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From 2020-04-29: https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people/ https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-mo... > Unti

From 2020-04-29: https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people/ https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-mo... > Until now, Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. > Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30. This is clearly stated as the intended policy at the launch of the free version. They temporarily lifted this restriction at launch due to COVID. They then delayed enforcing this restriction by ~9 months, because guessing the future of COVID was hard, especially in April 2020.

m-p-3 5y ago
They also launched Google Workspace for Individuals in some countries, which grants access to unlimited Google Meet calls (and other perks) for a monthly fee as well.
- oauea 5y ago
  Oh, it's only available in some countries? That explains why the docs reference options that don't exist!
  - m-p-3 5y ago
    https://blog.google/products/workspace/google-workspace-everyone/ https://blog.google/products/workspace/google-workspace-ever... > Workspace Individual is available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and coming soon to Australia.
    - oauea 5y ago
      I signed up recently from NL and half of their signup flow was pushing me towards personal workspaces, but I never got the option to actually select them. Was very confusing.
nomoreplease 5y ago
So this news story is meaningless?
- andrewmutz 5y ago
  It's not meaningless. It's an opportunity for HN to complain about the shutdown of Google Reader
  - flokie 5y ago
    good one :)
  - samatman 5y ago
    Ah, see I was going to take the opportunity to complain about shutting down the gateway from Hangouts to Google Voice! I'm a Fi customer with an iPhone, and when April of this year rolled around, I was living juuuust outside of cell service, thus relying heavily on Hangouts to forward SMS and provide voice calls. Google was supposed to replace this with something called, I believe, Messages by Google. But somehow they didn't manage to release this for iPhone... like ever as far as I can tell? Or at least not so far. So I was stranded without the ability to make voice calls for two months. Paying customer mind you. To be fair, Fi was an amazing deal when I was doing a lot of international travel, and I've stuck with it because the pay-as-you go aspect is still pretty nice (and because international travel will presumably return someday). But part of me wishes that after Reader was canceled I had just pronounced anathema on the whole company.
- tapoxi 5y ago
  I’m pretty sure this is another Google branding thing. I’ve been using it for free as “Hangouts Meet” for years. Now it’s just “Meet” and there’s no personal version anymore.
  - samizdis 5y ago
    I am losing track of things. In a personal Gmail account, I now have two options for video calls, Hangouts and Meet, listed separately in the l/h nav bar. This is also the case for a corporate Gmail account.
dmitriid 5y ago
> They temporarily lifted this restriction at launch due to COVID. due to Zoom. Covid was just a pretext. Google aggressively pushed Meet everywhere because Zoom posed a threat to them.
- laurent92 5y ago
  I don’t understand what is difficult with WebRTC videos. It seems they should push the service to everyone, unauthenticated, until Zoom is dead, if Zoom is a threat. Whereby does it…
  - AkshitGarg 5y ago
    > I don’t understand what is difficult with WebRTC videos. It is difficult to scale a pure p2p model to multiple participants. Each participant would need to create multiple WebRTC streams, one for each participant. So if some call has 10 participants, each one of them would need to broadcast 9 streams and receive 9 streams with the assumption that each one of them have their microphone and cameras turned on. This would consume a lot of CPU and bandwidth. There are alternate models where you send your stream to a central server, and that server distributes the stream to other participants. This reduces the CPU and bandwidth required per participant, but requires a central server. This looks like the model google follows. So I don't think keeping such a service unauthenticated would be a good idea.
DrammBA 5y ago
The article contains that information. Were you trying to highlight anything specific?

m-p-3 5y ago

They also launched Google Workspace for Individuals in some countries, which grants access to unlimited Google Meet calls (and other perks) for a monthly fee as well.

oauea 5y ago
Oh, it's only available in some countries? That explains why the docs reference options that don't exist!
- m-p-3 5y ago
  https://blog.google/products/workspace/google-workspace-everyone/ https://blog.google/products/workspace/google-workspace-ever... > Workspace Individual is available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and coming soon to Australia.
  - oauea 5y ago
    I signed up recently from NL and half of their signup flow was pushing me towards personal workspaces, but I never got the option to actually select them. Was very confusing.

nomoreplease 5y ago

So this news story is meaningless?

andrewmutz 5y ago
It's not meaningless. It's an opportunity for HN to complain about the shutdown of Google Reader
- flokie 5y ago
  good one :)
- samatman 5y ago
  Ah, see I was going to take the opportunity to complain about shutting down the gateway from Hangouts to Google Voice! I'm a Fi customer with an iPhone, and when April of this year rolled around, I was living juuuust outside of cell service, thus relying heavily on Hangouts to forward SMS and provide voice calls. Google was supposed to replace this with something called, I believe, Messages by Google. But somehow they didn't manage to release this for iPhone... like ever as far as I can tell? Or at least not so far. So I was stranded without the ability to make voice calls for two months. Paying customer mind you. To be fair, Fi was an amazing deal when I was doing a lot of international travel, and I've stuck with it because the pay-as-you go aspect is still pretty nice (and because international travel will presumably return someday). But part of me wishes that after Reader was canceled I had just pronounced anathema on the whole company.
tapoxi 5y ago
I’m pretty sure this is another Google branding thing. I’ve been using it for free as “Hangouts Meet” for years. Now it’s just “Meet” and there’s no personal version anymore.
- samizdis 5y ago
  I am losing track of things. In a personal Gmail account, I now have two options for video calls, Hangouts and Meet, listed separately in the l/h nav bar. This is also the case for a corporate Gmail account.

dmitriid 5y ago

> They temporarily lifted this restriction at launch due to COVID. due to Zoom. Covid was just a pretext. Google aggressively pushed Meet everywhere because Zoom posed a threat to them.

laurent92 5y ago
I don’t understand what is difficult with WebRTC videos. It seems they should push the service to everyone, unauthenticated, until Zoom is dead, if Zoom is a threat. Whereby does it…
- AkshitGarg 5y ago
  > I don’t understand what is difficult with WebRTC videos. It is difficult to scale a pure p2p model to multiple participants. Each participant would need to create multiple WebRTC streams, one for each participant. So if some call has 10 participants, each one of them would need to broadcast 9 streams and receive 9 streams with the assumption that each one of them have their microphone and cameras turned on. This would consume a lot of CPU and bandwidth. There are alternate models where you send your stream to a central server, and that server distributes the stream to other participants. This reduces the CPU and bandwidth required per participant, but requires a central server. This looks like the model google follows. So I don't think keeping such a service unauthenticated would be a good idea.

DrammBA 5y ago

The article contains that information. Were you trying to highlight anything specific?