Google Is Killing YouTube's 'Hangouts On Air' This Year

The latest Google product coming to an end is "Hangouts on Air," a fairly popular service for broadcasting a group video call live over the internet. "Notices saying the service is 'going away later this year' have started to pop up for users when they start a Hangout on Air," reports Ars Technica, noting that Hangouts on Air is completely different from "Google Hangouts," which just so happens to also be shutting down in the not-too-distant future. From the report: Hangouts on Air was popular with podcasters, since it was a super easy way to get a group of people together, on video, and have the conversation broadcasted live. Hangouts on Air started life on Google+ and transitioned to a part of YouTube in 2016, where live group video conversations could be created in the YouTube interface and then be recorded as a video for your YouTube channel. The service had great features like chat, screenshare, and an automatic camera system that would switch to the person that was talking, making it perfect for easy podcast videos. With Hangouts on Air dying, there really is no equivalent, easy way to do a live streamed group video chat. Google's shutdown message points people to YouTube.com/webcam, but that page is only for a single person on a local webcam, not a group video chat.

Now it's time for Google to come to an end

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing of value would be lost... just a bunch of half-baked products, and a lot of targeted advertising.

Never heard of it

[registrations_suck]

Wow, Google is getting rid of something I have never heard of. Darn!

Re:

[webmistressrachel]

OBS places a far greater demand on the hoster's bandwidth requirements, as all the chats have to connect to their client, then be streamed to Youtube. Hangouts allows them all to connect via Google's infrastructure, and stream from there.

This will have a bigger effect than you may realise.

Obligatory links ...

[kbahey]

Observe a moment of silence as yet another victim goes to the Google Cemetery [gcemetery.co], Killed By Google [killedbygoogle.com] ...

I'm really confused by this

[Smigh]

Google shut down many services that might not have achieved their expectations, but my perception was that this one was very popular in the podcasting scene. I see it all the time in most podcasts that I subscribe to on Youtube.

The only reason Google+ seemed like a cool idea

[Daralantan]

I remember thinking there was no reason for Google Plus to exist. Then I heard about the hangouts, where I think you could even watch videos on youtube as a group with your friends and talk about them. That seemed pretty interesting. I made a Google Plus and never used it or this features.

Fitting that the only appealing seeming thing to Google Plus is being killed along with Google Plus.

Guess they couldn't find a great way to profit and get more crap from it so it had no use for them.

New market opportunity

[tkotz]

If there is no other way to do this easily. It is a chance for twitch or better yet something open source to move into this area.

Could be an opportunity for something like https://meet.jit.si/ [meet.jit.si] to add the ability to join a room as observer only (fully muted, minimized icons). Or the ability to connect the youtube streaming api to the conversation.

Hangouts on Air Alternative

[Geige Vandentop]

They announced a date of August 1, 2019. You should check out StreamYard (I work there). I think it's a solid alternative to HoA for people looking for a similar feature set.