Internal Google Meet livestreams can now be viewed by other authorized Workspace domains

Abner Li | Jul 1 2021 - 9:15 am PT

In the transition to Meet, Google got rid of “Hangouts on Air,” or the ability to livestream video calls directly to YouTube for anybody to view. That feature is coming back, starting for education customers this year, but until then, Google is extending who can see internal Meet livestreams.

Google Meet currently lets you livestream a call for up to 100,000 users (e.g., company-wide all-hands or onboarding training) inside the same Workspace domain. This new cross-domain livestream feature means that other organizations can be given permission to watch. Workspace admins must first grant that trusted access with this being an extension of Google improving productivity across companies.

Note that you can add any Workspace domain to the trusted domain list, but we recommend that you only add domains that you own (such as subsidiary companies or schools in your school district), as adding domains can potentially give access to livestreams to anyone who has an account in those trusted domains.

The player more or less looks like YouTube, but with the Meet logo in the top-left corner and signed-in account specified at the right.

Meanwhile, users have the ability to enable captions in livestreams. Supported languages include English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Captions in live streams can help make meetings more accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, and can help other users who have a preference for reading text rather than listening get more out of the meeting.

Cross-domain livestreams started rolling out yesterday and are available for: