Thousands of workers across the globe who rely on Google Meets to collaborate with colleagues and clients are about to get a significant quality boost.
From October 2023, Google will support 1080p video streams for group calls after announcing in April that it would be supporting 1080p for one-to-one video meetings.
Support for 720p continues, as will support for 360p, which is designed to cater to users with poor broadband connections and those streaming via a limited mobile network.
Google Meet 1080p business calls
There are just a couple of caveats to the enhancement, and the most disappointing is that personal users with free general consumer accounts won’t be able to access higher video qualities.
It’s only subscribers of the following tiers that will be able to use 1080p video: Google Workspace Business Standard/Plus, Enterprise Essentials/Standard/Starter/Plus, Education Plus, and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Workspace Individual.
The second limitation depends on your computer’s hardware – a 1080p-capable camera is clearly required, but many of the best business webcams support even higher 4K qualities.
Other participants will only be able to see your stream in Full HD if they have your tile pinned in a large enough section of the screen to render the full 1920x1080 pixels.
Off by default, users will have to navigate to the settings menu to enable 1080p, but even with it enabled, Google will dynamically adjust the quality based on bandwidth.
Few video conferencing platforms have even considered supporting 4K despite our increasing reliance on these tools for working and connecting with family, but with many displays unable to handle this many pixels, especially for more than just two participants, it’s unlikely to be a feature that we’ll see soon.
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