We are thrilled to announce that live events are now generally available in Microsoft Teams – enabling anyone to create live and on-demand events to reach large online audiences. Live events in Microsoft Teams enables you to schedule, produce, broadcast and record rich, interactive streaming content. Up to 10k attendees can join live from anywhere and across any device or watch on-demand at their convenience.
Live events in Microsoft Teams enable an intuitive end-end experience for the event organizer, producer, presenter as well as attendees:
Simple scheduling and set-up experience:
Thinking of finally hosting that long-due event? Scheduling a live event and inviting your attendees is a matter of a few clicks. You can create a live event using the same Teams meeting experience that you are familiar with. Using the Teams app, you can assign appropriate attendee permissions, designate event team members, select production method, and invite attendees within your organization or make it public.
With simple scheduling and set-up experience, anyone can create a live event using Microsoft Teams
Choose appropriate production controls:
Live events in Microsoft 365 support a broad spectrum of production scenarios. Using simple production controls in Microsoft Teams, anyone can produce an high quality live event - using a webcam or A/V input from Teams room systems. For sophisticated production needs, such as for executive town hall meetings, producers can use external encoders to manage their live events with 3rd party hardware and software via Microsoft Stream. This is a great if you already have studio quality equipment, such as media mixers, which support streaming to a Real-time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) service.
As a producer, you can take control of the control the layout of the event, start/stop video streams, share desktop, enable live Q&A, make the event available on-demand and a lot more.
Check out how Microsoft is using live events to connect teams across the globe.
Increase engagement and reach new audiences:
Being able to interact with your audience helps you keep them that much more engaged and provides attendees more value from your event -
- Increase audience engagement and retention, and gather feedback on key areas using moderated live Q&A during the live event
- Make your event more accessible and extend your audience reach using AI capabilities such as live captions and translation. Live captions during an event make your content more accessible and make it easy for your attendees to follow along. Caption translation lets your attendees consume the content in the language they are most comfortable with.
Increase audience reach and enagement using AI capabilities such as live captions and translation
Analyze audience engagement and feedback:
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Post event analytics helps the event team gather insights from the Q&A, look for unanswered questions from your audience etc. Audience engagement report helps you analyze the audience engagement and look for ways to improve – be it content, tone, production style etc.Analyze audience engagement and feedback using event analytics
Optimize network bandwidth using trusted eCDN solutions:
Live event playback uses adaptive bitrate streaming, which is a unicast stream, meaning every attendee is getting their own video stream from the internet. For live events sent out to huge audiences within your organization, this can consume significant internet bandwidth. Microsoft's trusted video delivery partners now offer enterprise content delivery networks (eCDN) to optimize the bandwidth consumed while delivering a great end user experience during large scale Microsoft Teams live events -
If you are using Skype Meeting Broadcast currently, we encourage you to use live events in Teams. You can refer to complete Skype to Teams transition roadmap here.
Learn how to get started with live events in Microsoft Teams, and let us know your feedback. We are just getting started and will be bringing many new capabilities over the next few months, including general availability of live captions and translation, ability to add a guest or a federated user as a presenter, managing a live event from the full calendar view in Teams and lot more.
