Your Google Meet calls are finally going Full HD
Thousands of employees around the world who rely on Google Meets to collaborate with colleagues and customers are about to get a significant improvement in quality.
Starting in October 2023, Google will support 1080p video streams for group calls thereafter announced in April that it would support 1080p for one-on-one video meetings.
Support for 720p continues, as does support for 360p, which is designed to accommodate users with poor broadband connections and those streaming over a limited mobile network.
Business calls via Google Meet 1080p
There are only a few caveats to the improvement, and the most disappointing is that personal users with free general consumer accounts won’t have access to higher video qualities.
Only subscribers at the following tiers can 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 camera that supports 1080p is obviously required, but many of the best business webcams support even higher 4K qualities.
Other participants can only see your stream in Full HD if they have pinned your tile to a large enough portion of the screen to display the full 1920×1080 pixels.
Disabled by default, users must navigate to the settings menu to enable 1080p, but even with this enabled, Google will dynamically adjust 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 since many displays can’t handle that many pixels, especially for more than just two participants, this is unlikely to be a feature which we will see soon.