Google Meet‘s adding yet another new feature: Users can now livestream their meetings on the company’s popular video sharing site YouTube, giving them a new public platform both to stage a live event and to record any past meetings.
It’s an exciting feature, but one that could potentially be dangerous. Let’s hope no one accidentally hits the “livestream” button when discussing anything confidential.
Here’s how the feature works and what to know about it.
Livestreaming Is Easier Than Ever
Once the feature is available, users can turn it on by heading to Activities panel > Live Streaming and locating the correct YouTube channel to stream the meeting on.
Before the stream can be initiated, there’s a little work to do on the YouTube side of things: Users must have their channel approved for live streaming, which can take 24 hours, according to the blog post announcing the feature.
The new functionality is available to Google Workspace users, and comes with a safeguard: Admins will have to turn it on before it’ll be available for use.
It’s already rolling out, and eventually will be available on a range of plans including: Google Workspace Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade.
Is Livestreaming a Reason to Get Google Meet?
The feature is a boon to any companies with plans to run a live online event, and could be a simple way to expand their public-facing persona with streamed seminars or product announcements that will be hosted on YouTube, and easily searchable in the future.
Livestreaming isn’t completely unknown to other video communication software competitors, either. Zoom has a similar integration, although it’s for streaming on Twitch rather than the more ubitious YouTube.
In fact, by some metrics, YouTube is the most used social platform ever, beating even Facebook for the percentage of people who say they use it. Google Meet’s new integration is a big step in connecting company communication channels with the biggest platform for reaching the public with video content.
Marketing and PR teams will likely be the happiest with this new feature news. Well, the ones who already use Google Meet will be. We’ve reviewed all the best web communication softwares for business, and we rank a few others above Meet overall — namely Zoho Meeting and GoTo Meeting — Google Meet remains in the top handful of options.
