More than two years into the pandemic, as video calls have taken over workspaces, Google Meet now offers the ability to stream meetings to YouTubewhich could open them up to viewers more easily than the old method of streaming events by Meet itself.
Google Workplace admins can opt into public streaming for work accounts they manage, which also includes a few safeguards to ensure your weekly meeting doesn’t turn into an open mic.
This feature is available for most paid Workplace accounts: Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, Teaching and learning upgrade, Workspace Individual Subscriber, as well as Google One Premium plan members in select countries. On the other hand, people benefiting from most of the Starter, Basic, Legacy or Essentials formulas do not have access to it.
If you want to live stream a Google Meet session to YouTube, you must apply in advance for your YouTube channel to be approved. The approval process can take up to 24 hours. Users who wish to change the duration of streams can do so in their privacy settings. A full list of items needed to start streaming is available on this support page.
Google Meet has seen many changes this year, including its merger with Google Duo into a single voice and video call center.
Many changes in the year
In June 2021, an update for teachers on Google Meet mentioned the ability to stream events like school board meetings on YouTube, and now that’s becoming widely available (could take up to two weeks to become available to eligible accounts). Other features mentioned, such as improvements for meeting rooms and a “video lock” that allows hosts to mute everyone’s videos at once or mute everyone, have been implemented since then.
In March, Google also introduced some small but useful changes, like the picture-in-picture feature and emojis. Google Meet’s interface refresh brought an easy shortcut to avoid seeing your own face all the time, methods to pin and unpin content, and a single bar to hold all of Meet’s controls.