Since Hangouts were presented to the social networking community back in June, many have speculated that the utility of the video conferencing platform could expand greatly if they were to allow an unlimited number of people to watch in on a Hangout, rather than limit it to just the 10 people who were participating in it. Well, It appears that Google may be about to make a major announcement around their Hangout feature of Google+
Thanks to the work of Eric Martindale, Mohamed Mansour, and Robert McGee, last evening, we now have confirmation that a “Broadcast Live” feature now exists within the platform. The new option, which users will likely have, will allow them to create Hangouts which will still put a limit of 10 people on the number of users able to participate, however, it will allow for an unlimited number of viewers. This could greatly expand the use of Hangouts for a variety of public and private events. Imagine having a Google+ Hangout concert where thousands of people can watch in, or perhaps a Google+ Hangout political debate with several candidates, as well as a few lucky participants, all being watched by the masses on Youtube live. It appears that all these applications of Hangouts may soon be able to exist.
As you can see from the image above, along with a clear indication that the Hangout you are about to enter will be broadcast live, there is also a disclaimer that needs to be checked before entering a public Hangout, which states: “I Agree that my participation in this hangout will be recorded and publicly broadcast live on Google+ and Youtube, and made publicly available for later playback”.
Eric Martindale has also posted this step by step guide of how anyone can record and broadcast a hangout right now:
1) Join / create a Hangout.
2) Look at the address bar. You should see a something like this:https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/7d727f30da8
3) Copy paste the portion after “hangouts/” and before the ? mark.
4) Take the following URL, and replace <hangoutID> with the number above:https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/broadcast/h
Your URL using the example above should be: https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/broadcast/h
