Google’s Premium Video Meetings are Now Free For Everyone
“Google Meet: Premium video meetings. Now free for everyone.
We re-engineered the service we built for secure business meeting, Google Meet, to make it free and available for all.”
That’s how Google introduces the new free Google Meet – Google’s premium video conferencing system.
Video chatting/conferencing is a great way for families and friends to keep in touch and stay close in these difficult times of social distancing and where older folks are more vulnerable to the effects of the coronavirus.
Previously, Google Meet was only available to paying G Suite users and educators. Now anyone with a Gmail address can use Google Meet free.
For the time being, when you use Google Meet, you’ll be able to chat and video conference as long as you like, but starting in September, those using Google Meet free will be limited to one-hour meetings. The free version has a 100 participant limit and includes most of the features of the paid version like real-time captions, custom layouts, screen sharing, expanded tile view, and more.
You can use Google Meet on Windows using any modern web browser. For those using Android or Apple devices, you can download the appropriate mobile app. You can also start meetings via Gmail or Google Calendar.
Google emphasizes Google Meet’s security as other video conferencing tools, particularly Zoom, have experienced problems with security.
Here are some of the security features of Google Meet from Google:
— We provide a strong set of host controls such as the ability to admit or deny entry to a meeting, and mute or remove participants if needed
— We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts
— Meet meeting codes are complex by default and therefore resilient to brute-force “guessing”
— Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit, and all recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted in transit and at rest
— We don’t require plugins to use Meet on the web. It works entirely in Chrome and other modern browsers, so it’s less vulnerable to security threats
— On mobile, we have dedicated Google Meet apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
Can you help me, I have many photos on Googles photo site, however whenever I try to copy one to send to someone , I can’t.
I would like to transfer them to a flash stick photo stick, can you advise?
Thanks for all you guys do, the BEST.
Helen, you can’t copy from Google Photos and send to someone, you can share a photo by a link. If you want to send someone a photo or put photos on disk or USB flash drive, you have to download them to your PC first. Most of the time the photos on Google Photos are already photos on our computers, smartphones, or tablets. You can download one or several photos to your PC by selecting them (To select multiple pictures hold down the shift key and click each image you want to download. When you have all the photos you want to download to your device selected, press the Shift Key + D to download the photos.