The pandemic is receding, and as time goes by, some things are getting back to “normal” (or at least trying to). One of the activities that was routine for many during isolation was video calls, whether to meet friends, work or study. google-meet noticed this and opened up their services to allow longer group meetings. But time passed and the limits of the application returned.
Two years ago, the video call service of Googlewhich was born as part of the payment solutions of g Suite, started offering the Premium version of google-meet to all its users at no cost. This allowed meetings with several members for up to 24 hours. Nevertheless, Meet announced that these changes would be temporary.
In July of last year, Google modified its support page, where it clarified that the limitations of the Meet to free profiles. Within these, they could no longer make video calls of more than 60 minutes with three or more participants. However, they had not set a specific date for this change.
Now that the announcement has come from google-meet We cannot say that we are surprised by these changes. The company sent an email to its users and clarified that, as of this month, “Group meetings with three or more participants will once again be subject to the one-hour limit”. However, we will be able to continue holding individual meetings for up to 24 hours.
In case we want to exceed this time limit, we will have to pay a subscription for the Google One Premium Plan. This plan includes enhanced meeting features with Google Workspace Premium such as longer video calls, live streaming on YouTube, background noise cancellation, and live call recording. Meet. How much does it cost? $9.99 per month.
This plan also provides 2TB of storage on Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photoshelp from company experts, the ability to share it with up to five people, VPN for Android and iOS, among other benefits.
What are the other options for video calls? zoom which, with its free plan, supports up to 100 attendees with a 40-minute limit. is also Skype that allows meetings of 3 to 50 people for free, which are subject to a reasonable use limit of 100 hours per month and no more than 10 hours per day.
Other options are video calls by WhatsAppwhich are of unlimited time and up to 8 participants (or 50 people in Messenger Rooms) Y jitsi which also has no limits on duration or participants, but the more people there are (more if they exceed 75) the more problems there will be in the meetings.