The big giant companies are stepping up to fight with the Pandemic Covid-19. This time Google takes a big step forward. The global tech giant has announced to make its Premium Version of the Workplace Video Chat Tool (Hangouts Meet) Free until July 1, 2020.
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As the world is currently moving towards a total lockdown, Google’s decision will prove to be a gamechanger for the education and business industry.
Google announced the update through a blogpost stating-
“As more employees, educators, and students work remotely in response to the spread of COVID-19, we want to do our part to help them stay connected and productive.”
Hangouts Meet is part of Google’s G Suite-productivity tools with Google Docs and Sheets. Hangout meet also has both an education-focused version and a version for the large companies. All the premium features in these versions will be available for free till July 1, 2020.
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Some of the notable features from those features include 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and 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. https://t.co/OWWF7s5jjR
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) March 3, 2020
The announcement comes after one of the competitors of Google’s Hangouts Meet, Zoom announced to lift the time boundary on its free products for the people in China.
According to the analysts, this decision resulting in increased usage from Google might prove to bring huge benefits for the cloud software tool. Apparently, Zoom has also seen a huge increase in usage after their call to lift the time limit.
Google Cloud has likewise dropped its biggest meeting of the year, Google Cloud Next, because of worries over the coronavirus and is restricting employee travel to Italy, Iran, Japan, and South Korea. A week ago, Google affirmed that a worker who was in the organization’s Zurich office were found positive for the coronavirus.
