Google Meet has been updated with support for up to 500 participants on the video meeting service for premium Workspace customers. The company has upgraded the service, which grew in popularity alongside an increase in remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing users on the more expensive plans to host calls with more participants. The new limit is still half the number that is supported by Microsoft Teams, which currently allows up to 1,000 people to join a video meeting.
The company announced the changes via a blog post, stating that customers on Google Workspace Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Education Plus plans will now be able to host Google Meet calls with up to 500 participants. Customers on other plans will not be covered as part of this update. “We hope that by increasing the meeting size, it will be easier to connect and collaborate with your colleagues, clients, and customers,” the company stated.
With the new video meeting participant limit, Google Workspace customers will be able to accommodate more users on the company’s service. However, it is worth noting that rival Microsoft Teams currently allows 1,000 users to join a Teams video meeting. Google Meet, on the other hand, allows customers to enable livestreaming, which allows up to 100,000 viewers to tune in at the same time. Google said that the new limits for eligible customers started rolling out to eligible users on November 16.
Google has been updating its video meeting service with several new features over the past few months, including an audio-video lock feature that allows a host to mute participants during a call.
Back in September, the company announced important changes to its Workspace offering which added support for making voice and video calls from the Gmail app, as part of the company’s efforts to compete with rival services like Microsoft 365.
The company is also beta testing a live translation feature for select paid users, while users have also been able to use an automatic brightness adjustment feature for video calls.