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Hello. My name is Billy Howell and I am in North Carolina. As a technologist and a person who supports customers as a contractor, I have specific concerns around Teams and Teams Live events roadmap. Specifically ...
For entities who are held accountable for considering accommodations for users who have protected statuses such as deaf and hard of hearing, the ambiguity between teams and teams live events makes it difficult to determine which features are actually present in each platform. Entities who have to select solutions which are bound by these considerations are unable to consider the Teams platform for large scale meetings because the limitation of 1000 users that teams has for video streaming means that users who rely on sign language interpreters cannot see the interpreter. Teams live events doesn’t have that technical restriction on video streaming, but the newest sign language view is not available in live events. I would ask if the appropriate priority can be placed on either unifying both platforms' feature sets used for accessibility OR the 1000 participant limit be addressed so that live events can be retired as the work around? The 1000 participant limit seems like an engineering resource constraint put on the product to prevent oversaturation of that platform's infrastructure. The lack of unified features between the platforms seems like a lack of development resources. Both seem addressable from an outside perspective.
Hey Billy, I'm also a contractor with multiple customers. I agree with your sentiment, but I wanted to remind you of the scale of live events due to the distribution via CDN, vs a P2P call or hosted meeting. It's not practical to expect any meeting platform to host 10K participants in a real time stream. It's obviously an engineering constraint, but I wouldn't give MS a hard time over this decision, considering they're already double the capacity of their competitors. Zoom is considered the leader in this space and they only have plans for 100, 300 and 500 participants, with the option to purchase additional participants in 500/1000 chunks. Teams is already the industry leader on meeting capacity of 1000 for regular meetings and 10K in live events with the unique positioning of CDN distribution. They are very different use cases and should not be merged together. I do not agree with you labelling it as a work-around. It's not a work-around, it's a different type of meeting for a different use case. IMO, why would you ever want over 1000 participants in a meeting (reminder that PARTICIPANTS contribute to an unmoderated chat and can generally unmute, turn on their cameras and screen share, and I don't see a use case where you'd ever want to give that ability to more than 1000 people. Even if you can disable it for most in the settings - that's not the intended use case).
We're hoping this interpreter feature comes to live events soon, but for now we're using OBS to remix multiple camera feeds into a live event. Additionally, using OBS on a live event actually results in higher video quality.
Perhaps you can prepare an infographic for your customers to help them better understand?