Google has been immensely generous to provide its customers with free video calling for unlimited time in great HD quality and smooth video conferencing features. During the lockdown because of the pandemic, the users were using all video conferencing platforms and Google Meet was one of the most prominent because of its efficiency and quality.
Businesses, schools, universities, all of them were active on the Google video conferencing platform as this has become the new normal but Google has decided to change things in its favour a little.
After witnessing a meteoric rise in the usage of video calling and video conferencing services because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Google Meet has announced that the free version of its video chatting platform will only deliver up to 60 minutes of meetings and not more with effect from September 30th 2020.
This decision has been taken very wisely in favour of the company and the deadline also applies to other Google services such as G Suite and G Suite for education, this includes that Google Meet will add only up to 250 participants, a live- streaming session of up to 1,00,000 people in a single domain network and also the ability to save the meeting to Google Drive.
After the deadline, under this new extension, anyone with a Google account will be able to create a meeting with a limit of 60 minutes duration for free. Google spokesperson commented that what Google was delivering before to its customers was ‘enterprise’ tier of Google’s G Suite which now costs $25 for an individual per month.
The fact that universities were using Google meets to teach students during the pandemic, businesses were practically encouraging their employees to be safe and work from home, schools were using it for classes online. This was a huge loss to Google considering everything was for free from the past so many months.
Furthermore, Google is an active participant in contributing to the fight against COVID-19. The company launched new software and features like the auto-generated framework to help the state governments to deploy their own contact tracing applications, early exposure notifications etc.
The latest is the overlay in Google Maps which will differentiate the status of Corona Virus trends in places throughout India using colour codes to portray the intensity of cases so that people can make a more informed decision when planning to go on a holiday or a business trip.
