Google wants people using its video chat software so badly, the company is now giving it away.<\/p>\n
Starting Wednesday, Google Meet, the Alphabet Inc. company\u2019s teleconferencing app, will be available at no cost. Currently Meet is part of Google\u2019s paid workplace software suite. People can use the service for calls with as many as 100 participants. Google said it will cap free calls at 60 minutes, but won\u2019t begin enforcing that time limit until the end of September.<\/p>\n
The free offer is permanent, according to Smita Hashim, director of product for Google Meet. \u201cIt\u2019s going to last going forward, just like Gmail,\u201d she said. \u201cVideo conferencing has pretty much become an essential service.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, video calls are\u00a0exploding globally\u00a0as work and personal interactions move online during stay-at-home ordinances. Google\u2019s offering has grown — the company said Tuesday that more than 100 million people a day use Meet now. But it has ceded ground to rivals like Zoom Video Communications Inc., which reported 300 million daily participants last week. Facebook Inc. also\u00a0recently released a free video chat service.<\/p>\n
Google has tried to get a foothold in messaging many times, and mostly failed, despite its dominance in email and mobile phone software. To date, Google has packaged Meet with its G Suite service, which charges companies from $6 to $25 per user. For the first quarter, Google reported $2.78 billion in cloud-computing revenue, but it doesn\u2019t disclose G Suite sales.<\/p>\n
The video conferencing apps from Zoom and Google have been criticized for lax privacy and security measures, particularity in schools. Hashim said Meet is \u201cvery secure, very reliable and very easy to use,\u201d and will continue to add security features.<\/p>\n
To use the free service, the company requires that people have a Google account.<\/p>\n
Google wants people using its video chat software so badly, the company is now giving it away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":288986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[167,64380,13651],"class_list":["post-349950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-google","tag-google-meet","tag-zoom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349950"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}