Google Meet is cleaning up video quality for your nice, high-res monitor

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 when we’re dealing with spotty connectivity, have you ever felt a little underwhelmed that you don’t get a crystal-clear feed when using your desktop PC with its 4K monitor and gigabit fiber? Good news: Google’s doing something about that.

Google shares that Meet users on PCs and accessing through dedicated meeting-room hardware will start seeing higher-quality video streams of meeting participants. The company does warn that this will result in higher bandwidth utilization, but Meet will still automatically scale back if it hits a wall there.

Maybe the best part is that this is all automatic — if you’re accessing Meet through the web, and have a high-res enough screen, the upgraded quality will kick in by default, without you having to change any settings.

We still have a few questions about exactly what the requirements here look like — Google keeps talking about “users with high-resolution displays” but doesn’t appear to ever clarify exactly what constitutes that. We also don’t know exactly what the new bandwidth requirements will be. Workspace admins will eventually get access to some settings that should let them control details about how these upgrades are deployed, but it doesn’t sound like individual users will receive the same controls.

Still, if you’ve ever sat through a Meet call shaking your head at why everybody seems to be using a potato-quality webcam, this sounds like a huge improvement. Hopefully things start looking a lot better on your next call!