Alternative to Zoom - Meet

[CraginS]

Google has stepped up to the Zoom mess by opening Google Meet as a free alternative video meeting service. Normally it is available only as part of the G-Suite for paying enterprise users. For details see the blog post Google Meet premium video meetings—free for everyone.

The service itself is live at meet.google.com. For the free public version all users must log in with a Google (Gmail) account, and meetings are limited to 100 participants. (G-Suite users can get up to 250, and can invite non-members into meetings.) 

I ran a 30 minute two-party test of Meet this week. It worked pretty well, seemingly more reliable than Google Hangouts. The video stream is limited to 360p supports SD (360p) or HD (720p) resolution, lower than Zoom's high-res, but adequate for general conversations. The presentation option gives flexible screen sharing, for whole screen, single window, or selected area.  

I expect to use Meet for a few small meetings. Your mileage may vary. I am trusting that no Google servers hosting Meet are in China. 

Craig

[Shannon]

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@rslade wrote:

If you have ever been on a conference call, you will undoubtedly laugh at this.

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Have to say, it's what happens pretty often at the video conference sessions I attend. The most common is the background noise, echo & lag --- in the case of the 1st 2 , I try to avoid adding to the chaos by messaging the other party privately, but when there's a lag, we always end up asking one-another whose connection is bad.

Sometimes gets to the point where I have to refrain from laughing during the session.