By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, February 2013
In late February 2013, FishbowlLA promoted a Mediabistro post-Oscars Google+ Hangout — a live video discussion of the 85th Academy Awards. The piece previewed the big questions: could Emmanuelle Riva, the oldest Best Actress nominee in Academy history, upset Jennifer Lawrence? Would Daniel Day-Lewis make history with a third Best Actor win?
Then
The Mediabistro Google+ Hangout was characteristic of a specific early-2010s moment in digital-media event programming. Google+ included a “Hangouts” video-conferencing feature that the company was heavily promoting as a platform for live group video.
The 85th Academy Awards, hosted by Seth MacFarlane, went to Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress; Daniel Day-Lewis did make history with the third Best Actor win.
Now
Google+ was a substantial failure — discontinued in April 2019. The specific Google+ Hangouts live-event format no longer exists.
The broader category of live-video media-event programming has continued and substantially expanded — the 2020 pandemic-era explosion of video-conferencing mainstreamed the kind of live-video-panel format the 2013 Hangout had been an early experiment in. The format survived; the specific platform did not.
The 2013 piece reads now as a small documented artifact of a specific failed-platform moment.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.