Only ten people can join in to participate at any one time, including the moderator, which is usually KTTV's weather reporter Maria Quiban. But station execs say it's worth the effort, because the general public can watch it all unfold live, on both the Google+ social network and YouTube.
For Google, Hangouts on Air (#HOA) are another tool to differentiate itself and build awareness for Google+, the social network that with 190 million active members is about one-fifth the size of Facebook.
HOAs are increasingly popular. President Obama has done one, as has comedian Conan O'Brien, super model Tyra Banks, Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer. TV networks like MSNBC, the BBC, CBS and Al-Jazeera.
A few local TV stations have dabbled in HOAs, but few with the regularity of Fox11.
Having the consistent interaction with viewers every morning Monday-Friday has "helped us build an online audience in a place we normally wouldn't be," says Kingsley Smith, KTTV's news director. And it showcases how the station is different from competitors.
Google says interest in HOAs from media properties has grown substantially. "We've seen a significant ramp up of interest in the last year and especially the last few months," says Olivia Ma, Google's head of news and partnerships.
Broadcasters like engaging viewers with HOAs because they get "a wider range of participation from the audience," she adds.
Statistics are hard to come by, surprising since Google's YouTube network is all about numbers — how many "views" a specific video gets, or how many subscribers a channel has. The most viewed video ever on YouTube, Psy's Gangham Style, has 1.6 billion views.
Ma declined to reveal stats for HOAs, and Smith doesn't have them either.
What he will say is that the station has hundreds of thousands of folks signed up to the MyFoxLA Google+ site.
Google has been working hard to beef up Google+ in the past few months. It shored up photo sharing in May with additional storage (15 gigabytes) and is integral with the new Google Glass, the miniature computer you wear on your head.
Photos and videos taken on Glass go directly to Google+.
"I've seen numbers suggesting that (apps) Vine and Instagram have taken off in a bigger way this year," says veteran search analyst Danny Sullivan, who runs the Search Engine Land website. "But HOAs are still something unique about Google+ that some people use, but not everybody."
The social network is a success for Google, as the number two alternative to Facebook. "That's a big accomplishment," he says.
Quiban, who has over 1 million followers of her Google+ account, says bringing in viewers via webcam "puts the station "at the forefront of technology. It's been so much fun to expose our viewers to a totally different side of what we do."
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