Google Meet becomes accessible to everyone

The Google Meet video conferencing service becomes free and accessible to all holders of a Google account, to compete with Zoom.

Google Meet is a third of the size of Zoom in terms of daily active users, but the Mountain View company has a plan. Google wants to make Meet, its video conferencing service via G Suite, free and accessible to everyone.

The move comes when Google Meet experienced a sharp increase in the number of users due to widespread telework following the Covid-19 pandemic. Zoom has 300 million active users per day, Google Meet has 100 million and Microsoft Teams has 44 million. Teams is a hybrid of video conferencing and a competitor to Slack, but it has been widely deployed in the corporate world.

This videoconference battle should continue beyond the pandemic, as CFOs view remote working as a permanent part, to some extent, of the future. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, spoke about the strength of G Suite in education and business during the corporate earnings conference call. Google's bet is that it can give Meet a free level and then convert users into G suite customers. Zoom is also deploying a freemium model.

Three million new users per day

In a blog post , Google said that Meet will be gradually extended to more people to ensure stability. Users can sign up to receive notifications when Meet is available.

Google is looking to capitalize on Zoom's security concerns over the past month. But Zoom remains a verb for many and the company has set out to solve its security problems . By making Google Meet free, the group could also seek to thwart the momentum of Microsoft Teams, which uses Office 365.

According to Google, Meet has seen its maximum daily use multiplied by 30 and hosts 3 billion minutes of video meetings as well as 3 million new users per day.

For potential G Suite customers, Google is launching an edition called G Suite Essentials, which will have advanced features for Meet. Google is betting that the G Suite Essentials will result in full G Suite accounts. The Essentials will be free until September 30. Existing G Suite customers will have free access to advanced Meet features for live streams of up to 100,000 users on their domain and additional licenses without contract modification.