How to live stream Hangouts Meet meetings

Google has updated its video conferencing software Hangouts Meet to allow meetings to be streamed live online. Many companies have important meetings that require delivering a message to large groups of people, like a company-wide all-hands or onboarding training. Now, G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education users can live stream Meet meetings to support these needs. Meeting organisers in G Suite Enterprise domains can enable live streaming on their meeting in Calendar and invite their audience. With the stream URL, up to 100,000 in-domain users can watch the meeting from the web or their mobile device.

How to enable Hangouts Meet live streaming

The ability to add live streaming to a meeting can be controlled per organisational unit (OU) from the Admin console. To do this, open the Admin console and go to Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts and click “Meet settings.” Here, toggle “Let people stream their meetings.” This setting is ON by default.

How to create live streaming events

To create a streamed event, add live streaming to the event. You can distribute the stream URL in 2 ways:

1. Share the meeting join info and stream URL with all guests in one event.
2. Create a separate view-only event. These guests cannot participate in the meeting.

Guests you invite can share the stream URL and anyone in your organisation can watch.

1. Create an event.
2. Add guests and rooms. Meet joining info is automatically added when you invite guests or rooms.
3. Next to Hangouts Meet, select Manage Details.
4. Click Add Live Stream.
5. Depending on whether your guests should have the option to participate in the meeting, choose one of the following ways to stream:

• Allow guests to join in view-only mode:
  • Click Copy and then Done.
  • Paste the link into the event description or an email, making sure your guests get the link.
• Create an additional view-only event:
  • Click Done and then Save.
  • From your calendar, click on the event.
  • Select More and then Create view-only event.
  • Add view-only guests and rooms.

You can still invite regular participants to the meeting and record the meeting. You can also stop and start the stream as needed during the meeting.

1. Join the video meeting.
2. Select More and then Start streaming.
3. Select Start streaming again. Live appears in the top-left corner when streaming is on. View-only guests can now watching the meeting using the stream URL.
4. To stop streaming, select More and then Stop streaming.
5. Click Stop Streaming.
6. Verify that you want to stop streaming.

Live streams can also be removed from an event.

1. Open Google Calendar.
2. Select the event to edit it.
3. Next to Hangouts Meet, select Manage Details.
4. Click Remove Live Stream.

The meeting link changes when live streaming is added and removed. Share the updated link with others, if necessary.

Support for watching live streams on Hangouts Meet hardware will be coming in the next few weeks. When ready, meeting participants can start the live stream to allow everyone to watch. Please note that Free G Suite Enterprise for Education edition licenses are not eligible to live stream meetings.