To take its video conferencing beyond internal meetings and make them more accessible, Google Meet announced two new features: Google Meet Live broadcast across multiple domains and Live Caption for live broadcasts…
Live Streaming of Google Meet across multiple domains
This new feature will allow administrators to specify trusted Google Workspace domains as well as stream Google Meet videos. Administrators will also be able to invite users to view the videoconference on “paired” websites, whether they are members of the same group or invited to another workspace domain.
Google Meet currently allows you to live stream calls to up to 100,000 users (for example, company-wide cross training or onboarding training) in a single workspace domain. This new cross-domain live streaming feature means other organizations can be allowed to watch. Workspace administrators need to provide this trusted access first, because it’s an extension of Google that improves productivity across all businesses.
How do I schedule a live broadcast?
You can very well schedule live virtual events in Google Calendar. For this :
- Open your Google Calendar;
- + Click on the Create Event button;
- Add all the details of the event and the guests;
- Click Add Google Meet video conference;
- Click on the drop-down arrow;
- Click Add Live Stream;
- Click Add Live Stream again in the pop-up window;
- Share event and invite link for live broadcast;
- To make a live broadcast read-only, open the event and click the Edit tool (which looks like a pencil);
- Click on More Actions;
- Click Create read-only event;
- Share this link with the people you only want to give viewing access.
When enabled by a G Suite administrator, any attendee in the same organization as the meeting organizer can start or stop a live broadcast.
How do I start or stop a live broadcast?
You can start or stop the live broadcast if you are in the same organization as the meeting host and joined as a full participant. Guests who register as read-only cannot control the live broadcast.
- Open Google Calendar and join the video conference.
- Select More > Start Broadcast.
- Confirm that you want to start broadcasting. With streaming enabled, in the top left, you’ll see Live. Read-only invitees can now view meetings using feed URLs
- To stop the broadcast, choose More > Pause Broadcast.
- Confirm that you want to stop streaming.
Live Captions for Live Streams from Google Meet
The second feature is Live Caption during the stream, which greatly improves the accessibility of the video. Live captions make meetings more accessible for hearing-impaired users and can also help those who benefit more from reading than from hearing. They are automatically displayed in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Interested administrators must request access before the feature appears in their meetings. To enable it, users need to enable subtitles in the settings and set it to English before switching to the translated subtitles below. They can then choose one of the translated language options.
Admins have no control over captions during a live broadcast. Users can enable the Live Captioning feature, which is available to everyone by default, in Settings on the main meeting page.
Note that this feature is already available for Google Meet video calling, and Google is implementing it for live broadcasts on several websites as well.