Google Hangouts on Air

» see plus.google.com/hangouts/onair as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Hangouts on Air sat in the part of Google i read about more than i used. As an engineer in Turkey i had the technical context to understand what it was doing, but the actual use cases were mostly american. The Obama white house town halls were the cultural reference point, joined later by the NASA Curiosity landing watch party in 2012 and a string of cable-show aftershow Q&As. Hangouts on Air made it possible for any Google+ account to invite a few people into a multi-camera video call and broadcast that call as a free youtube livestream without owning a single piece of streaming hardware.

Google launched the feature on September 20, 2011 as part of the original Google+ Hangouts rollout, then formalized it in mid-2012 with the launch of the Hangouts on Air branded layer. The original distribution channel was Google+. Each broadcast also generated an automatic YouTube upload of the recording. For a couple of years it was the easiest free way for a small podcast to run a panel show.

The migration to YouTube Live happened on September 12, 2016, when Google announced that Hangouts on Air would move off Google+ and live inside the YouTube Live tooling instead. The actual feature kept working under YouTube branding for almost three more years. On June 20, 2019 Google posted that the integration was being decommissioned on August 1, 2019, with no equivalent multi-camera replacement on YouTube. The recommended successor was YouTube Webcam Live, which only supported a single host on camera at a time.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

2012 to 2014 was the peak window. Google ran a press blitz featuring everyone they could convince to do a public Hangout. President Obama, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, the cast of Dancing With The Stars. The 2012 Obama state of the union Q&A had millions of concurrent viewers and was credited at the time as the moment streaming political events became a normal thing. Behind the celebrity stunts there was a long tail of small podcasts running weekly panels with no budget, which was the actual cultural use case.

~ the cracks ~

The feature started fading once Google+ started fading, which was almost immediately. By 2014 most podcasts had migrated to dedicated tools like Zoom or were paying for proper streaming software. The white house Q&As stopped being framed around the platform. Hangouts on Air ended up as the default option for hobbyist multi-camera livestreams and not much else. When the September 2016 YouTube Live migration happened, most of the existing user base did not really notice, because the actual recording flow looked identical from inside their account.

~ the next chapter ~

The August 2019 shutdown left a real gap. YouTube Webcam Live could only put one person on camera. StreamYard and Restream picked up the multi-camera browser-based livestream pattern as paid replacements, which is what most of the surviving Hangouts on Air audience eventually moved to. The recordings of old Hangouts broadcasts kept playing on YouTube as static videos, which is how you can still watch the 2012 Mars landing party years after the tooling that made it possible was gone.

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