Some of us are getting a big Google Meet video quality upgrade

Video conferencing systems like Google Meet are often designed to be incredibly flexible, handling users on devices of all different capabilities, from personal phones to dedicated meeting-room hardware. And while we appreciate that we’re dealing with poor connectivity, have you ever felt a little frustrated that you don’t get a crystal-clear feed when using your desktop PC with a 4K monitor and gigabit fiber? Good news: Google is doing something about this.

Google Shares that Meet users on PCs and accessing through dedicated meeting-room hardware will be able to see high-quality video streams of meeting participants. The company warns that this will result in higher bandwidth usage, but Meet will automatically scale back if it hits a wall there.

Perhaps the best part is that it’s all automatic – if you’re accessing Meet via the web, and you have a high-enough-resolution screen, the enhanced quality will turn on by default without you having to change any settings.

We still have some questions about what the requirements here actually look like — Google keeps talking about “users with high-resolution displays,” but never clarifies what exactly that constitutes. We also don’t know what the new bandwidth requirements will be. Workspace administrators will eventually have access to some settings that will let them control details about how these upgrades are deployed, but it doesn’t seem like individual users will get the same controls.

Still, if you’ve ever nodded off during a Meetup call wondering why everyone was using potato-quality webcams, this seems like a huge improvement. Hopefully things will look much better on your next call!