Hangouts On Air Feature Now Available To All Google+ Users

Search giant Google has now made the 'Hangouts On Air' feature available to all Google+ users. The feature, that allows users to broadcast their Live hangouts publicly (by checking Enable Hangouts On Air), was initially (back in September, 2011) made available to a limited number of celebrity users that included sportsmen like David Beckham, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and American President Barack Obama, among others.

Hangouts basically use live video for allowing people to interact with each other.

With the feature, users can broadcast publicly- users can broadcast their live hangouts from the Google+ stream, YouTube channels or personal websites; See how many viewers they have got (even during the broadcast, users can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching Live); and record and re-share- Once off the air, Google+ uploads a public recording to the users YouTube channel and to their original Google+ post so that they can share and discuss the broadcast after it's over.

"Of course, launching millions of live stations takes some doing, so we're rolling out Hangouts On Air gradually, over the next few weeks. In the meantime you can save the date for an upcoming hangout," wrote Chee Chew, engineering director at Google, in an official Google blog post.

As of now, Hangouts On Air is available in the US, UK, India, Japan, Canada, among other countries and can be used by users who are over 18 years in age and who have a YouTube account in good standing without any strikes (strikes on a YouTube account basically means that the user has previously posted content to YouTube which violates the YouTube policies).

Here's a video explaining the feature

Google had earlier added a dedicated Hangouts page to the Google+ site that has a rotating billboard of popular hangouts, pro tips and other items. The page also has an 'always-updated' list of invitations from the people in the user's circles and provides quick access to every public and 'On Air' hangout.