Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Google+ Hangouts improves single broadcaster functionality

Google+ Hangouts has the ability to do a group chat with full video and audio, on the web or in mobile apps, for free which is unmatched by any other service. Group chat is great but sometimes you may want to broadcast just yourself, previously you would be displayed in the main window but also in a smaller window along the bottom which is the participant strip. If you think about it, it was quite useless to have the participant strip along the bottom if you were the only person in the hangout.

Now, for these single participant streams, Google is making it possible to push the video to the entire window, maximizing the used space. It is now the default functionality, Google has updated their Google+ Hangouts functionality so that when there is only 1 broadcaster in the hangout, they are now presented in a full window.

I think this is a great feature which will allow the screen space to utilized by a broadcaster to it's fullest potential. Hopefully someday soon I will host a Google+ Hangout to chat technology related things with my subscribers and twitter followers.

-Ubu out

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