Google Making Advanced G Suite Meeting Features Free in Response to Coronavirus

Google has been significantly affected by coronavirus this week, with the company cancelling its biggest developer conference I/O 2020, as well as its Cloud Next 2020 conference. The company is now taking some actions to help out other businesses with a surge in remote work due to coronavirus concerns.

Google announced last night that the company is making its “advanced” Hangouts Meet video-conferencing features available to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers for free.

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Previously, these features were only available to those using G Suite Enterprise Edition or G Suite Enterprise for Education. In a move to support its customers, Google is making the advanced features available for free to all G Suite and G Suite for Education users till July 1, 2020. The advanced features include:

• Larger meetings, for up to 250 participants per call
• Live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain
• The ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive

“We want to help businesses and schools impacted by COVID-19 stay connected: starting this week, we’ll roll out free access to our advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities through July 1, 2020 to all G Suite customers globally,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a tweet.

This is obviously a good move by Google, but you will still have to actually pay for G Suite to access these features. Microsoft, on the other hand, is making Teams more accessible by giving away all the premium features of Microsoft Teams for free for six months in response to coronavirus.