After more than one year of Google allowing users with free accounts to make Google Meet calls that could last all day, Google is finally ending access to longer videos calls. The original idea was to allow those working remotely and children doing virtual learning to communicate easily during the COVID-19 pandemic. With that ending, users are going to be limited or forced to find other sources of communicating in groups.
COVID-19 forced many to remain at home, children weren’t allowed to physically attend school, and businesses started to shut down. If businesses remained viable, it was because they took advantage of remote working and finding new ways to communicate with their teams. In order to help facilitate this, Google postponed a limitation to users with free accounts – users could make calls using Google Meet with three or more people and not be limited to the usual sixty minutes per call. Normally, a certain payment plan would need to be in place for this to be allowed.
It now looks like Google is ending that promotion. During the course of the pandemic, Google had extended this offer a couple of times when things didn’t return to normal as expected. After the call deadline was lifted in April of last year, Google said the company would enforce it again in September of 2020. When that time came, it was pushed again to March 2021, and then again to June 30. Google has not since made an announcement to push it further and has now enacted the 60-minute deadline again, according to 9to5 Google. Meet will remain a platform with some neat features, but it will be a little more limited going forward for those who don’t use it in a professional capacity.
$10 Per Month For Day-Long Calls
If users still want to make calls that last all day, they’ll need to upgrade their Google account to the Workspace Individual tier. As long as the host has this account upgrade, calls will last as long as needed within a 24-hour timeframe. In the end, Google is a business and it does cost money to run these services, especially if users are actually making calls that last the majority of the day, so it makes sense that this change has happened. While a lot of people are still either learning or working from home, it could be that extending it out so long was already hurting the business. Now, with the global health crisis tapering down, this might simply be as good a time as any to put the deadline back in place.
With people returning to work in a limited capacity, and children beginning to go back to school again, it makes sense for some companies to remove offers they had made available during the global pandemic. Google won’t be the last company to start charging for certain features again and other options do exist for making video calls that last longer than one hour.
