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Google appears to have accidentally revealed its new group videoconferencing service for businesses on Tuesday, a week before a big user conference.
The service, called Meet, appears to be its offering for businesses that want to do group meetings over the Internet. According to a saved iOS App Store listing captured by
AppAnnie, it will support high-definition video meetings with up to 30 participants. ]
That’s an upgrade over the company’s Hangouts instant messaging and video calling service, which only allows meetings of up to 10 people.
TechCrunch initially noticed the listing for Meet, that has since been removed. It doesn’t seem like Meet is going edge out Hangouts, considering that the app’s name in the iOS App Store is “Meet by Google Hangouts.”
Google is holding its major business user conference in san francisco next week, and it looks seemingly that we’ll hear more concerning Meet at that time.
The Google Cloud Next website lists many sessions centered on team communication, including one referred to as “The future of team communications,” that cryptically says that attendees can study “the latest additions to G Suite in the area of team communications.”
Unified communications and videoconferencing became a progressively hot market, with veterans like Microsoft and Cisco competing with dedicated startups like Zoom and chat apps attending to expand their functionality like HipChat and Slack.
Google has been an old player in that house, particularly on the consumer side with Hangouts, however, Meet appears like a more concerted effort to appeal to an enterprise audience.
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According to the AppAnnie listing, the service is integrated with G Suite, thus people will be part of meetings from both Google Calendar and Gmail.
Based on one of the App Store screenshots, Meet seems to support calls with users from multiple organisations, not just the one originating the call, which might be useful for businesses that require to support conversations with partners or vendors.
G Suite Enterprise users also will be able to get a dial-in phone number, thus people will connect to a call with a standard phone. It’s almost like offerings from other videoconferencing services like Skype for Business, WebEx, and also the recently launched Amazon Chime.
A website for the service, set at meet.google.com, is still active as of this writing. Users are ready to log into the service employing a Google account, however beginning a meeting through the web portal needs a meeting code.
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It also seems as if the website is merely accessible using Google’s Chrome Browser. once accessed through safari or internet explorer, it asks users to download Chrome and doesn’t provide them access.
That said, the settings for the service provide some additional clues of what it’s capable of. Video sent and received through the desktop seems to be capped at 720p, and users will value more highly to send and receive 360p video, or only receive audio.
Google failed to immediately respond to an invitation for comment.
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