Google extends free access to advanced video-conferencing features till September 30

Google on Thursday said that it will offer G Suite’s video conferencing solution Google Meet for free until September 30.

Last month Google had extended its advanced Google Meet video-conferencing features available at no cost to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers till July 1.

Owing to global lockdowns in light of the coronavirus pandemic, the search giant has now extended ts free video-conferencing services till September 30, 2020, “to ensure businesses, organizations, institutions, and educators continue to be supported during this time,” it said.

G Suite and G Suite for Education customers can now host meetings via Meet with up to 250 participants, live-stream sessions to up to 100,000 people within one domain, and save meeting recordings to Google Drive for free. Google generally only offers these features to its “enterprise” G Suite users within a plan that costs $25 per user per month.

Google Meet is the recently rebranded version of Google’s Hangouts Meet. Google also said that earlier this week, it had surpassed a new milestone, with more than 2 million new users connecting on Google Meet every day who are spending over 2 billion minutes together.

Video-conferencing apps are witnessing a massive surge in usage overall as more people are mandated to stay at home to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. For instance, video-conferencing platform Zoom in March had garnered over 200 million users, up from its 10 million users in December 2019.

Microsoft’s Teams, Microsoft’s video-conferencing tool saw a 1,000 per cent increase in usage in, the company said Thursday.

It had also said that a new record of 2.7 billion “meeting minutes” in a single day had been reached on the platform.

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