Event banner
Event details
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?
You are free to take issue with my interpretation of it being an engineering decision to limit teams video streaming. I remain unconvinced. Regardless, if the features exist in a smaller meeting, they should exist in a larger one. And if MS takes the stance that they are separate products and use cases, then the entities which MUST consider accessibility as a requirement will give that money to Zoom to be compliant.
- I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just saying that your comment of both being addressable from an outside perspective isn't really a fair assessment, nor is it helpful during an AMA when people are simply trying to ask questions about this new feature. As a technologist, you must understand the significant complexities under the hood for this and realize that it's not quite as simple as "feature exists in small meeting and therefore must automatically be available in large meeting." It sounds like you don't want your customers to be giving money to Zoom and your preference is for Teams - if that's the case, check out OBS Studio and the Teams Encoder if you actually want to talk "work-arounds" https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/produce-a-teams-live-event-using-teams-encoder-b0026c9d-fd37-4bb3-bffc-6961f221fbe9#ID0EDF=Teams_Encoder I also still stand by my statement: if you're customers are having trouble with this, then it's up to you to help them understand or to find a solution for them.
- Also your use case of OSB for combined web stream doesn't provide individuals the freedom to pin and size the window which may help them most. If their status is compounded by needing not only sign language, but also screen magnification, then they are excluded still. Whereas, if they could manage the stream they need, they can participate.
- What if you have multiple streams for ASL, BSL, PSE? Again, if this feature was available, the users could be selective about their experience. Instead of technologists being prescriptive about their experience.
- And it is helpful for me to outline exactly why approaches like you are suggesting are insufficient to meet the needs of affected users. It also gives me direct access to the folks who make design decisions to emphasize that these workarounds (which I will still use as a term) don't meet specific needs.