More than two years into the pandemic, as video calls take over workspaces, Google Meet is now bringing the ability to livestream meetings to YouTube, making them more accessible to viewers than the old method of live streaming events through Meet. Google Workplace admins can choose public streams for the business accounts they manage, which also includes some railings to make sure your weekly standup doesn’t turn into an open mic.
This feature is available for most paid Workplace accounts: Enterprise tiers (Starter, Standard and Plus), Education Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Workplace Individual members, as well as Google One Premium Plan members in certain countries. However, people on most Starter, Basic, Legacy or Essential packages do not have access.
If you want to livestream a Google Meet session on YouTube, you’ll need to request your YouTube channel to be approved in advance. Approval process may take 24 hours. Users who need to change how long streams can be and for how long need to change their privacy settings and a full list of what’s required to keep streams running is available on this support page.
Google Meet has seen a lot of changes this year — including being combined into a single hub for voice and video calls with Google Duo.
In June 2021, an update for teachers on Google Meet mentioned the ability to stream events like school board meetings on YouTube, and now it’s really becoming widely available (it may take a few weeks to be available for eligible accounts). Other features mentioned, such as improvements for breakout rooms and a “video lock” that lets hosts turn off everyone’s videos at once or mute them all, have since been rolled out.
In March, Google also introduced small but useful changes like picture-in-picture and emoji. Google Meet’s interface refresh brought a simple shortcut to avoid seeing your own face the entire time, ways to pin and unpin content, and a single bar to house all of Meet’s controls.