Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#91

Post by mcintyre1994 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:43 AM UTC

alec wrote: post #75

I work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about this because the video/audio quality is much higher. When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993. In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution. I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel m…

Is this the same service I'll have been using if my company has Google Suite and we've been using meet.google.com to run meetings? Asking because I've had the opposite experience - we've used Zoom for a few meetings recently and get massively better quality than we did on Meet, and I'm not sure what could be going wrong there. Or is this a new premium Meet service that's higher quality than both Meet and Zoom?

Zoom also displays a much much wider angle which feels like it explains the quality difference - the Meet one is a tiny portion of my webcam blown up and horribly artifacted.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#92

Post by hooksfordays » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:44 AM UTC

chillydawg wrote: post #88

7ewis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet already has grid view, can show up to 16 people.

Does it ? I've looked and looked and looked for it. I'm not running Chrome/Windows though, so presumably I'm a second class citizen.

It released a week or two ago, so if you've been using Zoom recently, you might not have noticed. It's under the overflow in the bottom right > change layout.

I'm on Firefox/Mac and has worked fine for me.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#93

Post by mcintyre1994 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

chillydawg wrote: post #88

7ewis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet already has grid view, can show up to 16 people.

Does it ? I've looked and looked and looked for it. I'm not running Chrome/Windows though, so presumably I'm a second class citizen.

I'm on MacOS/Firefox and it started showing a grid view for me a couple of weeks ago. I just assumed they were just rolling it out to replicate Zoom, but maybe it could have been configured somewhere on the G Suite side too.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#94

Post by jedberg » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:46 AM UTC

kartayyar wrote: post #76

grandinj wrote: post #48

I don't have the mental space to waste filling it with details of another Google communication product they are going to discontinue in a year.

Google products ( and other tech company products ) are discontinued when they don't take off. Meet has a 100 million daily call participants. And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.

> And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.

Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it.

If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and then hope everyone noticed the update.

They won't, so I'll spend the first few weeks individually pinging people reminding them of the new conference software, and then waiting 10 minutes for them to download, install, and configure it before joining us.

And then if I decide to switch back, I get to do it all over again.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#95

Post by disillusioned » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

llarsson wrote: post #82

Ok, sorry for being dumb. Is Google Meet actually an entirely new service, or just re-branded Hangouts? When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a Meet, when it used to be a Hangout. My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is Meet actually good/better?

Your confusion is fair, considering that, up until two weeks ago, Google Meet was actually called Google Hangouts Meet. And yes, it is a completely and entirely different service.

Hangouts is still the legacy chat program that featured some video and voice call capabilities. Meet is their Zoom competitor, built for GSuite users, and is under active development and is a very solid product with very strong video/voice performance, up to 250 attendees, dial-in numbers, live transcriptions, recordings, screen sharing, etc.

They rebranded it as Google Meet literally two weeks ago. They are killing Hangouts Classic. They have... also spun up Google Chat (formerly Hangouts Chat) which is... a pseudo-competitor to Slack, and an evolution of Hangouts, but only for GSuite users, with the intent of killing Hangouts Classic (the evolution of GTalk) early next year.

Meet is far more advanced and better supported that the legacy Hangout for a conferencing tool. It is far better, and we really prefer it. (Though, because it also bears mentioning, Google is ALSO working on Duo, which is their CONSUMER video chat program, which has some neat features, like AI audio gap-filling and super-low-bandwidth AV1 codec benefits, which I hope make the jump over to Meet soon...)

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#96

Post by jsnell » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

mr_gibbins wrote: post #55

They're late to the party. The canapes have been consumed, the beer has been drunk and everyone's down to that miscellaneous yellow dip and the leftover breadsticks. Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's got any reason to use your product.

All three of those platforms have released some numbers recently, and both the usage and the growth rate of the usage seems pretty comparable. All of the following quotes are from during April:

One of them says:

> Since January, we’ve seen $SOFTWARE’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, $SOFTWARE is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, $SOFTWARE’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million.

Another:

> We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. [...] We’ve also seen total video calls in $SOFTWARE grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March

And the final one:

> The maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on $SOFTWARE was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid.

The quotes are not from the same time during April, and are not directly comparable in that sense. But if we're talking about the three options being a month apart on an exponential growth curve, it seems premature to call winners.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#97

Post by jedberg » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67

crazysim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely saw Zoom crushin' in an internal call. Hilarious. https://9to5google.com/2020/04/25/google-meet-zoom-competiti...

Wow, that must have been embarrassing. Also, from the article: > In some cases, though, many are just wondering how this service hardly anyone had heard of became so popular. Yeah, the first time I've heard of Zoom was when it landed on HN frontpage for doing some shady stuff on MacOS. Fast forward few months, my wife is asking me if I heard of it, because she'll have to start using it... I was similarly blindsided b…

> or maybe I'm just older and don't pay attention anymore.

It's that.

People make fun of me when tell them I like to talk to teens about technology. Why, they ask. Why? Because I learn about all these new upcoming platforms. I ask them "how do you get music now", "how do you share photos", "what do you use instead of Facebook".

And I learn about Snap, TikTok, Instagram, etc. long before they are popular.

These platforms all thrive on word of mouth. Teens still hang out mostly in person in school, so they have rapid word of mouth.

Talk to teens about technology. It will be enlightening.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#98

Post by say_it_as_it_is » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

It's as if a world of people have chosen to ignore how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Choosing Google rather than Zoom for privacy's sake doesn't address these concerns.

Nothing is free, especially when Google is providing the service. You are the product.

How are you the product with Google Meet? I can speculate, based on how it monetizes information in its other products. Google is processing all of the conversations through its deep learning systems, harvesting insights about everything discussed.

This heightens privacy concerns 100x from whatever Zoom was attempting.

Where are the activist blog posts about this? They don't exist because Google surveillance has been normalized. It's ok if Google does it.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#99

Post by hknd » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:53 AM UTC

thsealienbstrds wrote: post #35

DrScump wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number I just now tried the Google account creation process on an unactivated mobile device, and entering a phone number can be skipped. Entering a birthdate was mandatory.

Try to use it for a while also. My experience has also been that, after a short time, you will be required to provide your phone number for security reasons.

no it's always optional - they recommend adding one to be able to retrieve a lost/hacked account

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#100

Post by disillusioned » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:54 AM UTC

mr_gibbins wrote: post #55

They're late to the party. The canapes have been consumed, the beer has been drunk and everyone's down to that miscellaneous yellow dip and the leftover breadsticks. Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's got any reason to use your product.

Google Meet has 100M daily active users... and they're adding 3 million users a day. I don't... think the party is over. Those of us using GSuite appreciate not having to also pay for Zoom, and use it religiously. And its conference room hardware is nice, too. Plus, it's tightly integrated into Google Calendar.