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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

We have Google Hangouts equipment in all our meeting rooms at Square, and use them for many (most?) meetings. They generally work great.

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What do you mean by hangouts equipment? (genuine question, I didn't know they had hardware)

Update: Never mind, I googled it :) very cool. So it's reliable? I'd love to suggest something like this for my organization. We waste the first 10 minutes of every. single. meeting. just getting situated. It's very frustrating.

I've had good experiences with the $1k Hangouts boxes [1][2]. At first they felt unnecessary vs just dedicating one person's laptop to a hangout in each meeting, but the 5-10 minutes here and there that they save, the professionalism they bring to team meetings, and the improved audio quality from the dedicated mic makes them worthwhile.

I think $1k is a bit steep for what they are hardware-wise, but they're still worth it.

[1]: https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/2911/a...

[2]: https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/1706/a...

If you decide to suggest this, be sure to buy Chromebox _for meetings_. The regular Chromebox cannot be upgraded or converted into a Chromebox for Meetings. This caught me out the first time.

https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/catego...

Well, it's video conferencing, so of course sometimes it completely fails to work for no discernible reason. But generally, yes, it's pretty reliable. :-)

And yet there is another thread on HN today saying that hangouts is going to stop working shortly on Firefox, as, inexplicably, it uses a plugin rather than WebRTC on FF.

Also, given that they're in the process of shutting down the hangouts API, it doesn't really inspire confidence.

WebRTC, on the other hand, seems to have a bright future.

I don't think any of it's made by Google. I think we have these or something similar: https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/devices/#meetings

Same at Udacity.

Yup, same at Twitch.

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