Google makes premium version of Hangouts Meet free amid coronavirus outbreak

The select Hangouts Meet features will be available to all G-Suite users for free till July 1, 2020.

These features are available only to G-Suite Enterprise users. (Google)

As a part of its efforts to help students and employees connect with one another as they attend lectures and meetings from their homes, Google is rolling out free access to its advanced Hangouts Meet app, which is a video-conferencing app available as a part of the G-Suite that helps users to connect in groups for video chats, to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers.

"...as more businesses adjust their work-from-home policies and adopt reduced travel plans in response to COVID-19, we're helping to ensure that all globally distributed teams can still reliably meet face to face, even if employees are not in the same location," Google wrote in its blog post.

The advanced Hangouts Meet features will allow companies to add up to 250 participants to a video meeting and live stream content to up to 100,000 viewers within a domain. In addition to that, these features will also enable users 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

These features will be available "through July 1, 2020 to all G Suite customers globally," Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai Tweeted.