Live events now generally available in Microsoft Teams
Published Mar 26 2019 09:00 AM 41.1K Views
Microsoft

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 TeamsWith 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 translationIncrease 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 analyticsAnalyze 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.

 

 

37 Comments
Brass Contributor

Is there a way to create Live-Events in Teams for Organizations which still use Office 365 without Exchange Online and without Exchange Hybrid configuration? Because without that there is no Meeting/Calender App in Teams available where I can plan a new live event. A link/website to create live events for Teams would be great just like it was possible with Skype Meeting Broadcast.

Silver Contributor

I wonder if analytics is a readable file or like with Skype Broadcast a csv with lots of noise you have to filter out before it becomes useful.

Microsoft

@Michael Böhm  - you can create it directly from the Stream app. Have you looked at that? 

Microsoft

@wroot - currently it's a CSV file - but we are investing in richer analytics across the board. Stay tuned! 

Brass Contributor

@Praveen Maloo  I know that, but it works completely different and is not working in combination with Microsoft Teams. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/live-create-event

Bronze Contributor

Could you share how the administrators could follow these meetings? How we could found how many participants there has been during time, how many live events our organization have had etc..?

Bronze Contributor

I must say, that there are still several bugs which I would like to see will be fixed:

- Even you do not share the video you need to enable your camera, otherwise your voice is not recorded.

- When you share the content the preview window goes over the "Stop Sharing". Only button available is [End], but that destroy the whole meeting.

- Even I'm sharing a window, the text says I'm sharing desktop.

- If I do not share anything, but meeting is runnin the text says: "The live event will continue in a moment". In my mind if I'm speaking all the time, the meeting is running all the time.

- The preview window moves only by clicking the top part of the window. It would be easier if you can move no matter from where you try to drag it.

- The attendee report does not show participants looking for the records, even the QA does (in case someone ask a question).

- When you are on the live, you have three ways to leave the meeting :

   1. [Leave] - on top right

   2. [End] - Below the live stream

   3. [Hang up] - On the preview window

- The logic when having only one presenter: when you select the share on the live event, that goes to live directly. What is the purpose of the Queue on the left site?

- If you have many different speakers it would be nice to have own chat channel for the meeting between them.

 

Microsoft

Hi @Petri X - thanks a lot for taking the time to give such thorough feedback and helping us improve the experience. 

We will look into these in detail and get back. Meanwhile, for features you would like to see, please vote and help us prioritize live events features.

 

Re: you question around admin usage reporting - that's on our backlog. 

 

@Sonu Arora 

Bronze Contributor

Hi@Praveen Maloo 

I feel that those are bugs instead of feature requests. Or has the world now change so much that bugs are missing features today? :D

Microsoft

I meant any feature requests besides these ;) @Petri X 

Silver Contributor

Blogs are not meant bug reporting either :) Although aside uservoice there are no place to report bugs. Well, other than creating a support case, but that can be hideous having to deal with often clueless first line support..

Microsoft

@Petri X tenant admin usage reporting for Teams live events is coming soon! 

Microsoft

@Petri X  ACK on the bugs. Can you help clarify few things for me? 

I must say, that there are still several bugs which I would like to see will be fixed:

>> Even you do not share the video you need to enable your camera, otherwise your voice is not recorded.
[Is the request here to broadcast only audio? What would you like to see in the Stream if only voice needs to be broadcasted?]

>> When you share the content the preview window goes over the "Stop Sharing". Only button available is [End], but that destroy the whole meeting.

[OK - we will look into this one]

 

>> Even I'm sharing a window, the text says I'm sharing desktop.
[OK - we will look into this one]

>> If I do not share anything, but meeting is runnin the text says: "The live event will continue in a moment". In my mind if I'm speaking all the time, the meeting is running all the time.
[If the curtain says "the live event will continue in a moment", that means we are not streaming any A/V to the attendees. Was your experience that attendees were hearing your sound even when this curtain was being displayed?"

>> The preview window moves only by clicking the top part of the window. It would be easier if you can move no matter from where you try to drag it.

[OK - got the ask] 

>> The attendee report does not show participants looking for the records, even the QA does (in case someone ask a question).
[Sorry, I didn't fully understand the issue here. Can you please elaborate? ]

>> When you are on the live, you have three ways to leave the meeting :

   1. [Leave] - on top right

   2. [End] - Below the live stream

   3. [Hang up] - On the preview window
[Clicking on "end" ends the broadcast for the attendees.  Producer can click on Leave or Hang up to leave the broadcast - but broadcast is still running as long as any other presenter is actively presenting]

>> The logic when having only one presenter: when you select the share on the live event, that goes to live directly. What is the purpose of the Queue on the left site?
[We will be optimizing the experience further when there is a single presenter]

- If you have many different speakers it would be nice to have own chat channel for the meeting between them. 

[There is a chat channel between the event team members (producers/presenters.]

Bronze Contributor

>> Even you do not share the video you need to enable your camera, otherwise your voice is not recorded.
[Is the request here to broadcast only audio? What would you like to see in the Stream if only voice needs to be broadcasted?]

 

The strange thing was, I could not hear the voice even I was sharing the slides. Only option to get voice was to start my web cam (even I did not share that). But honestly, isn't up to presenter do s/he like to share audio only, video only, presentation only, or combination of those.

 

>> When you share the content the preview window goes over the "Stop Sharing". Only button available is [End], but that destroy the whole meeting.

[OK - we will look into this one]

 

Remember, you need to have Teams in full screen mode. The you get this problem as the preview opens on righ lower corner.

 

>> If I do not share anything, but meeting is runnin the text says: "The live event will continue in a moment". In my mind if I'm speaking all the time, the meeting is running all the time.
[If the curtain says "the live event will continue in a moment", that means we are not streaming any A/V to the attendees. Was your experience that attendees were hearing your sound even when this curtain was being displayed?

 

Yes, I heard still my voice.

 

>> The attendee report does not show participants looking for the records, even the QA does (in case someone ask a question).
[Sorry, I didn't fully understand the issue here. Can you please elaborate? ]

 

When the event if over, the producer get the report of the event. That cointains few .csv files. One covers the attendees, and other Q&A. On there Q&A contains the questions from person who listen the presentation later, but attendee list did not. If you go and look the reports after one month, it would be strange to see questions from attendee who has not been in the meeting, if you trust to the reports.

 

- If you have many different speakers it would be nice to have own chat channel for the meeting between them. 

[There is a chat channel between the event team members (producers/presenters.]

 

Sorry to not found that :)

 

 

Bronze Contributor

You are very correct @wroot that blogs are not bugs reporting tools. But spending time with this amount of issues together with premier support and having the first line questions, will just means for me to not do it. As normally you cannot report multiple issue per support case. We tested with the preview also, but somewhere on past we could not found the feedback channel.

Copper Contributor

Is max time length on these live sessions?  

 

We’re hoping to do day long seminars using this feature... But Stream events are limited to 4 hours max.  How about these events in Teams?

 

 

Copper Contributor

Is Teams/Stream integration fully functional in the Government Cloud yet?  Teams works, Stream works, the PowerShell setup looks good, but no option to schedule a Live Meeting.

Bronze Contributor

Hi @Praveen Maloo & @Sonu Arora 

 

Do you have any updates for sharing about the Live Events? Looks like "New Feature: Admin usage report for Microsoft Teams live events" is coming in some time frame, which is great ! But wishing to see other improvements as well :)

Microsoft

Hi @Petri X :  In terms of improvements, are you referring to the bugs you raised above? What are the top 3 items you would like fixed in the product?

Microsoft

@BigJonny Live events are now available in Microsoft Government Community Cloud (GCC).  

Brass Contributor

@Praveen Maloodo you know when/if the Live events will be available to the Teams Room systems?  I've done some trials and I wasn't able to get the URL to have a single touch join.  Just wondering if this is something on your roadmap as there are a few customers that have inquired about it and there is very little documentation about it. 

 

Thanks!

Microsoft

Hi @James Vaughan - today, we support Live Event presenters to join via a Teams Room System. Regardless of role, the Join button should show up if you scheduled a Live Event and added a Teams Room System. Let me reach out offline to resolve. 

 

Separately, I'll work on highlighting this in our documentation. 

Copper Contributor

@Sonu Arora… we'll also ask our TAM, but all is not yet well in the State of Denmark.

 

We can now create a Live Event using Teams (the dropdown is now there), but...

 

  • Noone else from our org is able to join the meeting in any role... presenter, producer, attendee.  Instead an error message appears (the event is live, and so on)
  • The production options are limited to Teams, and the "Recording available to producers and presenters" option is grayed out.
  • When the meeting is made live, the recording light is on, but we cannot see where the recording is being stored.  It does not appear in Stream
  • We have confirmed that all of the guidance laid out in the following is good in our tenant: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recording
  • My user account looks like it is licensed OK with "Stream for Office 365 for Gov... G3"
  • Stream works OK outside of Teams - I am able to manually upload videos just fine

Happy to send on more details if needed.  Maybe it's not fully there yet?

Microsoft

@BigJonny  sent you a private message. Let's follow up there.  

Brass Contributor

Our Office 365 tenant is based in the UK and we can create live events.  However, under Live event permission, choose who can attend your live event, we don’t see the Public option.

In the following section, How do you plan to produce your event? we don’t have the option to produce in Teams, it defaults to ‘An external app or device’.  As we don’t have an external encoder, we are unable to schedule live events.  At the bottom of this article, the notes mention, “Producing in Teams not yet available to all users in the UK.  Coming soon.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/schedule-a-teams-live-event-7a9ce97c-e1cd-470f-acaf-e6dfc17...

 

Is anyone else in the UK able to produce in Teams?

Microsoft

Hi @Paul Mitchell - ability to Produce in Teams will be released very shortly to tenants within the UK data center. If you're an admin, you should be able to see the O365 message center post that we recently released announcing. 

Copper Contributor

I was wondering if the phrase "Generally available in MS Teams" means that you don't need an E1, E3 or E5 license in order to broadcast live events from Teams. I have a customer who is still using S4B for live webinars. They have a M365 Business subscription. I sent them some screenshots on how to set up live broadcast, but they didn't find the option anywhere. MS support informed me that you needed  one of the E-licenses at the time. I have an E5 license, so no issue for me. But a lot of my SMB customers do not have E-licenses, nor do they have the budget to switch let's say 50 users from a 12€-15€/user/month subscription to the more expensive 30€-50€/user/month subscription, in order to keep organizing live webinars.

Bronze Contributor

My colleagues found a strange issue on Teams' live event:

 

The following article: Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams (Teams live events)  put some limitations to Live Events:

  • Concurrent live events in an Office 365 tenant: 15

 

The question is: how our users knows if concurrent 15 live events are already scheduled/started? 15 times 10k meetings is huge amount of people. But as this limitation does not looking for the participants, but events itself, we might have serious troubles. Think about your CEO book Live Event for their business partners and at the same time there is 15 other meetings started already.

Microsoft

Thanks @Petri X for your feedback! The limit of 15 only applies to Teams Live Events and further each Live Event production type - Teams & App/Device - separately have a 15 event limit. 

 

We definitely understand that there might be scenarios like you mentioned. To ensure no one falls into that scenario we are looking into ways to better highlight the limitations more prominently for both the end users as well as tenant admins. For admins, they will always be able to get a high level view of Live Events through the Admin Usage Report. 

Copper Contributor

I have an office 365 license and I am unable to see Live events in my calendar.  What can I do to get this turned on?

 

Deleted
Not applicable

Hi,

 

Just wanted to know, is the live event feature only available to Enterprise plans???


https://support.office.com/en-us/article/get-started-with-microsoft-teams-live-events-d077fec2-a058-...

 

Thank you

Copper Contributor

Hi,

 

Is it possible to change the "live event will continue in a moment" screen that flickers when you send a presenter live?. Sometimes you cannot queue due to a sudden change in the preceedings of an event. It would be better if it was just a black screen or grey screen with no text for a split second.

Bronze Contributor

I actually would like to see that screen never appears, until there is a real pause on the session. E.g. if like to speak only, not share anything nor having video turn on, that page appears !? Is it really so that voice is not enough good modality for Live Event? Do you @Praveen Maloo have any clue about this? 

Copper Contributor

Hi there, is anyone aware of a MS Teams Live Event embed code we could use to place on our public website so when a meeting is running Live the public can view it direct in their browser without having to download the Teams client?

Many thanks in advance

Dave

Bronze Contributor

@Wittser 

But you can follow the Live Event using browser already and join as anonymous, if anonymous joins are allowed. So attendees do not need the desktop client from Teams.

Copper Contributor

@Petri X 

 

Thank you so much and I should have qualified in my original ask, apologies.  Does this also work for people accessing via Mobile Phone as we have found they are being required to download Teams App which is causing confusion, etc...  rather than just viewing in a Browser?

 

Many thanks

Dave

Bronze Contributor

@Wittser 

For that I can see you need the app on the devices. Some says you do not need to sing-in to that, but you need it. But this I cannot confirm, not enough test devices available :D

 

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