Hangouts on Air is back as Google Meet brings YouTube livestreaming to free Gmail

Abner Li | Jul 21 2022 - 2:13 pm PT

The ability for Google Meet to YouTube livestream is rolling out to personal Gmail accounts and several other Workspace tiers.

Live streaming is useful in situations where you want to present information to large audiences outside of your organization, giving them the opportunity to pause and replay as needed, or view the presentation at a later time.

Google Meet has long offered livestreaming for internal domains that need to host large internal meetings. The public YouTube integration was originally pitched at education customers (e.g., school events and board meetings), and is now expanding to many more users:

Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade customers
Available to Google Workspace Individual users
Available to Google One Premium plan members in select countries
Available to users with personal Google Accounts

Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Education Standard, Education Fundamentals, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers

When the feature is enabled by your admin (for Workspace users), you can start a livestream by navigating to Meet’s Activities panel > Live Streaming and selecting a channel from the list. Google advises some prep before initial use:

To initiate a YouTube live stream through Meet you should have your YouTube channel approved for live streaming in advance. Note that it can take up to 24 hours to get your channel approved for live streaming — Visit the Help Center to learn more about live streaming Google Meet events.

Google Meet’s YouTube livestreaming is rolling out starting today and will be fully available in the coming weeks.

In expanding to personal accounts, Google has essentially brought back the Hangouts on Air capability found in classic Hangouts, which was removed in 2019. It was useful for podcasting with other people in different locations.

However, personal Gmail accounts might want to subscribe to Google One Premium (2TB plans and greater) to avoid the one-hour group calling limitation on free users.