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

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#61

Post by corentin88 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:53 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.

This party is slippering. But the neighbors are partying as well. And they have way more beers.

Google Meet is late indeed, but might gives some peps. It’s already a crowdy market - you forget to mention Messenger as well as some startups. Zoom has taken the lion’s part - apparently - but that’s very fragile share. Users jump from one service to another for many reasons (network issue, I’m used to X, let’s try Y, etc.)

Only the ones with the more beers will be able to stay.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#62

Post by EGreg » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #12

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing Google cookies and your IP. Demanding that your communications partner…

How exactly would you get the traditional identity info like the address FROM A PHONE NUMBER?

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#63

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #27

jpkeisala wrote: post #5

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. If there is no guest accounts this will not be intresting for many.

Agreed. While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform. The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?". I…

> "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"

Speaking of that, my last experience with Google Meet in business setting was this: every other meeting someone from our team would disappear in the middle of a call and reappear a minute later. Reason? Google's bullshit random "you need to re-verify yourself and type in your password NOW NOW NOW!" prompt that logs you out until you comply. Since us developers only used our company GSuite accounts for Meet calls (all communication unfortunately went through Slack), the only time we'd get this prompt would be a few minutes into the call.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#64

Post by saberience » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #4

I've been using Google meet as a remote student for a while (Google made meet available for free for education accounts a while ago already) and it's been a great experience, even with large groups of people online. We tested up to ~80 without any problems.

My company uses Zoom and we do our monthly whole company meeting using Zoom without issues. Whole company is roughly around 700 and I've seen us get up to 600 without issues.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#65

Post by michaelt » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

m12k wrote: post #34

travbrack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet supports up to 100 participants. That would be pretty tough to do e2ee. Is there a service that can do that?

How come this is hard to do with 100 participants? Not a crypto or video encoding expert, but I'd have thought each participant would have a decryption key for their stream, and this key they would transfer to others by encrypting it separately with each other participant's public key and then broadcast that bundle to everyone. Thus everyone else can decrypt only their entry in that bundle using their private key, an…

If you want a HD stream for someone who is talking, and an SD stream for each person in grid view and users on slow connections, you either need access to the unencrypted HD so you can downsample them, or all platforms to support Scalable Video Coding [1] so you can downsample by dropping otherwise-opaque encrypted packets.

And the former is easier than the latter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Video_Coding

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#66

Post by jasoncartwright » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

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.

Please spare us this trite cliche being rolled out again

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#67

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

crazysim wrote: post #37

londons_explore wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform. The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?". I…

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 by the sudden rise of TikTok. These new platforms feel like coming completely out of the blue these days... or maybe I'm just older and don't pay attention anymore.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#68

Post by dawnerd » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:03 AM UTC

fraencko wrote: post #41

I use meet professionally on a daily basis as my company is a GApps for business customer and most people I talked to are pretty satisfied. Sound, connection and video quality is very good, far better than Slack in my opinion. We had meetings with more than 100 paticipants. Integration in Google Calendar is also a big plus. One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles and the hang up…

On iPad it’s even more frustrating as the buttons only show up on tap and they go away really quickly so if people are joining it pushes the buttons up and you end up missing it. They really need to fix that.

At least they no longer block you from using the website if you’ve disabled camera access.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#69

Post by EGreg » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:04 AM UTC

m12k wrote: post #46

joshuamorton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider resolution. With non encrypted video, you receive one hd stream. With 100 people, you'd need 100x the bandwidth, and supporting things like highlighting speaking people would need to be done client side.

I honestly thought that was the case already (that highlighting is happening client side, and that my client receives each stream separately). So what you're saying is that currently a central server is performing the task of merging those 100 streams into a single stream for users. So it needs to do this separately for each user configuration of how they want to see the streams?

1. Basically, in a peer to peer topology you’d have 100x99 streams going. Everyone sending to everyone.

2. With a star topology and a central SFU you have 99x2 connections only. Much less bandwidth being used. The economics is that everyone pays the central server.

3. Now, I would wager there is a way to do some sort of sparser version of option 1 with beefy peers playing the part of “supernodes”. I think that’s how skype used to work before M$ bought them and made it less P2P

But regarding the encryption, yes you can have an SFU or whatever but you won’t have adaptive resolution of the SFU or supernodes can’t decrypt your stream in transit.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#70

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

tartrate wrote: post #53

tsukurimashou wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having a concept of "loyalty" for apps and corporations is beyond me

Loyal user is a well-recognised term in marketing among other areas meaning someone who keeps using the product over a long period of time. It's not more complicated than that.

Yes, but "loyal user" is in the same box as "target audience" and all the other terms in the marketing vernacular. This is a language of people taking advantage of others, talking about their victims. It makes little sense to use such language voluntarily on yourself.