Friday, March 29, 2024

Google improves performance of Meet and Zoom on Chromebooks

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Google has a real winner for the year of the pandemic in Chromebooks. The devices are deployable and easily maintained for cloud-based remote work. This past year of 2020 has driven the largest growth the company has seen for Chrome OS devices.

Mountain View has decided to invest more into this trend with on-going improvements to Meet and a new partnership with Zoom. Google sees these changes as a way to make sure education and remote workers have a more fluid experience with both its in-house Meet platform as well as the dominant player that Zoom has become.

It’s all about the dynamics

The main alteration Google has made is how Meet sessions are streamed. The company claims its optimized the backend processes on how Chrome OS handles the network and bandwidth. Meet now takes into account device, open streams, and even simultaneous chats taking place while on calls.

Google hopes this leads to less dropped sessions by instead altering the resolution and screen frame rates to keep the stream going while other things are hitting the network. This is much the same way content streaming services like YouTube and Netflix handle network jams while playing a video. Using this same type of approach on live calls seems like a natural progression for Google Meet.

Education specifics

Google also notes that it added a few things to make the classroom setting a little easier. You can now raise your hand, use a virtual whiteboard, break out rooms, and polls inside the Meet interface. These additions are a great way to make sure teachers have features to utilize with the kids in their classrooms.

Zoom gets some love too

Google recognizes that Meet doesn’t meet all the needs of every user. Engineers have been at work with the Zoom team to make sure some of these tweaks make it to that platform as well. The main of which is dynamic streaming. Zoom will now adapt to the network and system payload to lower or raise the stream quality as needed.

Video calls have been crucial over this crazy last year and looks to continue in 2021. It’s nice to see Google continuing to invest in both Meet and Zoom for Chromebooks.

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