It has been a year, and Google’s so-called killer feature hasn’t taken off. The Google+ team is having a difficult time getting users to widely adopt the product, according to sources familiar with the company’s service. Part of the trouble isn’t necessarily getting Google+ users — or “Plussers” in platform-enthusiast parlance — to use Hangouts, but to actually keep them coming back.

Think of it in real-world terms: Gather a bunch of people in a room together who may or may not know each other, and it’s difficult to sustain an active conversation without direction. Similarly, as time passes in a Hangout, the novelty of a group video chat wears off. In the lack of direction, the retention rate suffers.

Thus the dilemma of Hangouts on Google+. Sure, it may be a cool feature, but in the long run, is cool enough?

Google is trying to combat this lack of direction, as the Google+ team heavily pitches directed ways to use Hangouts to anyone and everyone who will listen. If users can actually commune around a focused activity, the idea goes, they’ll want to continue coming back to Hangouts.

I spoke with Google for this article. Though the company did not comment, I was directed to the existing uses of Hangouts on the company’s Google+ page.

At the top of that list are the most obvious targets: Content destination sites that people already visit on a daily basis. That means publications and brands like the New York Times, Wired Magazine (which, disclosure, I previously wrote for), CNN and other major news and entertainment outlets.

It’s good for the news orgs, because they’re essentially given a lightweight, embeddable tool to host live video discussions on their sites, completely free and powered by Google. And it’s obviously good for Google in raising the Hangout brand awareness, and hoping that will extend to “Plussers” using Hangouts on their own.

There’s also the more obvious media play, pitching celebrities on Hangouts as a way for stars to get closer to their fans, similar to amassing a healthy Twitter following or a host of new fans on a Facebook page. Get enough fans to hang out with their favorite celebs, and perhaps those fans will keep coming back.

One of Hangouts’ most promising features, however, is perhaps one of the most difficult to convey: In-Hangout apps. As of now, there are a handful of applications that you can launch from within a group chat session, essentially giving the Hangout an activity to focus on.

Though the current selection is weak, Google debuted a number of games at its I/O conference in June, possibly foreshadowing a larger push into Hangout-based games in the future. And now that the Hangouts API is out of preview, developers could potentially bolster the selection over time (granted, I’d expect that would require some heavy Google lobbying).

This could be especially important for Google, given that a number of major game developers are already pulling titles from Google+, citing a “much larger following on Facebook,” and a much more “active” user base than Google+. If standalone games aren’t working, perhaps Hangout-based games could do better.

Finally, there’s the looming possibility that Google could incorporate communication across properties, rather than continuing to isolate products like Talk, Google+ Messenger and Hangouts. At the I/O conference last month, Google product manager Nikhyl Singhal hinted that we could see an integration of the three separate products soon enough.

This looks to be the direction Google is pushing in. After all, Larry Page speaks of Google+ as a “social spine” across all Google products, and Vic Gundotra’s most recent Google+ usage statistics are measured by activity across all Google products, not just Google+.

Will directing users on how to use Hangouts be enough, or will it take the more forceful approach of injecting Hangouts across other Google properties? Whatever the case, Google needs to convince users that however novel Hangouts may be, they’re worth more than just an initial test drive.

And it’s that kind of online connectivity that is expected to drive the next wave of growth on the consoles.

In a new report, market research firm DFC Intelligence said it believes console sales will regain some momentum in 2014 and 2015 as new systems from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony hit the market.

As a result, DFC is estimating that by 2017, 39 percent of console game revenue will be via online distribution and online revenue sources.

Nintendo is the first of the hardware makers to announce plans for its next console, which is expected to hit this holiday season. The Wii U will come with features encouraging consumers to connect online, including video chat and Miiverse, a social network where avatars walk around a virtual plaza. With Miiverse, game players will be able to post their thoughts in speech bubbles that appear over their heads with text or drawings — sort of like a status update on Twitter or Facebook.

With existing consoles, players often have the option of downloading new content for games, but typically the original game was purchased on a disk and didn’t require an Internet connection. Sony and Microsoft have not yet announced their plans, but both are expected to eventually release new hardware that will be more connected to the Internet than ever before.

Other companies — like Amazon, Valve’s Steam and Electronic Arts — are also in various stages of offering digital distribution channels.

Despite reports of a soft console market over the past year, DFC is still forecasting the industry to grow over the next five years to $82 billion in 2017 from $67 billion in 2012.

In addition to new consoles fueling some of this growth, the research firm said, the increase is thanks to PC and mobile gaming. Worldwide revenue from online games will reach $35 billion in 2017, up 84 percent from 2011, and PC game revenue is expected to pass $25 billion in 2017, up from about $20 billion in 2012.

The service is a Web application for person-to-person video calling, with an emphasis on matching people who have common interests.

It has been in the works for nearly two years, and has a clear ancestor in Chatroulette, the anonymous video chatting start-up that Fanning and Parker had advised for a time.

Fanning and Parker gave me a tour of Airtime last week, in preparation for a press launch today that’s sure to be full of razzle-dazzle and celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Kristen Bell.

Like Chatroulette, Airtime also allows for anonymous use, but it is built on top of the Facebook platform and requires a Facebook account. If users behave inappropriately, they are kicked off the service. So the system knows who a user is, whether or not the user elects to share his or her name with a video chatting partner.

It’s unclear if Airtime will work — will people want to use it? Will it fill up with spammers and skeezy dudes? Is it technically sound? But what is clear is that there are high expectations for Parker and Fanning’s next act. Parker, in particular, is now a celebrity figure for his roles at Facebook and Spotify, and from Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of him as a master manipulator in “The Social Network.”

Plus, they’ve now raised more than $35 million in funding, and have been working on this for the past two years without a public release.

But why would we want to video chat with people we don’t know? Parker and Fanning argue that they are helping bring serendipity into a world where people’s online social graphs are set. Airtime is a “social discovery” application for helping people make new friends online, not necessarily for the purpose of dating.

It’s a category with many other companies — for instance, open social networks like Badoo and MeetMe (formerly MyYearbook), video chat companies like ooVoo and Rounds, and mobile location apps like Highlight.

Fanning and Parker think the video aspect of Airtime is particularly important; the medium of synchronous video is highly intimate and reciprocal, tending people away from multitasking and toward reading each other’s body language. There’s no lurking.

The two have a particular challenge in that Airtime will require a significant number of concurrent users — they estimate 5,000 to 10,000 — before users can have a good range of options to find new people. Their own notoriety should help with that — but if not, Airtime will look a lot like the original Color, a start-up with tens of millions in funding and nobody using it.

The Airtime interface looks like a desktop, with a row of available friends on the right side and two video panes in the middle. Users log in through Facebook — Airtime doesn’t even have its own login system.

Then users can ping their existing Facebook friends — it turns out that Airtime is also trying to be a Skype competitor — for a video call, without requiring additional downloaded software beyond Flash. Through integration with XMPP on Facebook, friends will get Airtime alerts through instant message chats, and can click to get to Airtime directly.

Or they can elect to have Airtime find them a conversation partner based on common interests and mutual friends, according to Facebook. In order to combat spam and scamminess, users can’t target chat partners based on a specific interest, or by their gender or age. However, the Airtime system is built to track markers of a successful match, like conversation length, to try to better match people as they use the service more.

Within Airtime, users can watch videos together. They can click to give each other props, prompting a shower of stars on the screen.

What can’t they do? Use Airtime from mobile or share music. An iOS app is weeks away, Parker said, while music deals are on the horizon. Additional planned features are more gamification stuff and video effects, including games built on the Airtime platform, Fanning said.

Another thing Airtime users can’t do is have multiparty chats, though they can conduct multiple one-on-one chats simultaneously. That means it will be harder for Parker and Fanning to use their celebrity connections, like Google has been doing with Google+ Hangouts, where a big star draws a big crowd.

Taking that one step further, on Monday morning Google launched Hangouts On Air, an extension of the Google+ group video chat that allows users to stream Hangouts live for anyone across the world to watch. Just like local access, you can broadcast your ideas, music or wacky opinions into the online ether and hope that at least someone is interested in what you have to say.

“This is a much more efficient and pervasive way to organize a conversation,” Hangouts product manager Nikhyl Singhal told AllThingsD in an interview. “Maybe I needed satellite trucks and switchboards for something like this in the past.”

It works the same as an existing Hangout: Host a video chat, with up to nine other people joining you in the conversation. But flip the “enable Hangouts On Air” switch, and your chat goes from private to public. What’s more, you’re not limited to broadcasting to Google+ users alone; embed the Hangout in your Web page or your YouTube channel, and folks can watch from there, too. It’s also possible to record the broadcast for replay later.

Yes, part of this is to allow the everyman the ability to speak to a larger audience, similar to the way YouTube broke new ground in the user-generated content realm back in 2005.

When giving users content carte blanche, however, the inevitable questions arise: How will Google deal with hate speech, illegal activity and porn? I’d urge you to take a spin on Chatroulette if you don’t think this is inevitable.

Though Singhal wouldn’t get into specifics, he said Hangouts already has plenty of help to deal with that from YouTube. “How do you flag copyrighted content? How do you deal with a live conversation? We’re leveraging the expertise of YouTube, who have been thinking about this problem for several years. The technology that we’ve employed — support, operational pieces, copyright rules — all of that is based on YouTube’s experience.”

Aside from potential obscenity, there’s a whole other part to the initiative: Catering to those who already have a following. Google has already hosted On Air Hangouts with big names like David Beckham, the Muppets and President Barack Obama, and the company has invested time and resources into training other large outlets — like the New York Times and Wired, to name a couple — on how to run their own On Air Hangouts.

To some degree, it can’t hurt for these stars and media outlets to give Hangouts a try. It’s free and easy publicity for them to do a quick online chat (for celebs, it’s like an online press junket for an upcoming film or TV release). And there’s also the potential to drive traffic to other pages.

Of course, Google wants to bring aboard as many people as possible. While Larry Page has no problem touting Google+ sign-up numbers, user engagement is a whole other issue. According to a comScore report released in February, users on average spend mere minutes a month on Google+, while that number is measured in hours on Facebook.

And, now more than ever, it’s important to remind users about Hangouts, one of Google’s strongest advantages over Facebook. Currently, Facebook offers Skype integration for one-on-one video chat between users, but lacks the group chat option that Google+ touts so heavily.

Thing is, people actually want to use Facebook. A lot. The jury is still out on Google+. So perhaps giving users the chance to blab about whatever they want, on air and uninhibited, will actually convince them to spend more time on the site.

At the very least, they won’t be sandwiched in between infomercials in a 2 am time slot.

(Image courtesy of quicheisinsane/Flickr, doctored by Mike Isaac)