Teams Meeting vs. Live Event

[Lisa Wright]

Hi everyone

We regularly host Live Events for our manager webinars and they work really well. However, the next one might require more than 9 presenters so I was thinking of moving it to a Teams meeting as I understand the max. is 9. I will have around 120 attendees. I am wondering if it's a good idea to have that many people in the meeting or would it be better to get the presenters down to less than 9 and stick with the live event. I am concerned about quality of the streaming. Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks

[#2]

@Lisa Wright a Teams Live Event can have up to 250 presenters, but only the last 10 to speak are displayed in the list - see footnote 2 at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-events/plan-for-teams-live-events#teams-l...

[#3]

As an alternative, you could just run it as a Teams meeting, and assign the Presenter role only to those who need it (give all others the Attendee role).

That would prevent attendees from taking over the screenshare, muting the presenter, etc.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

@Lisa Wright I would say it's unlikely to be a problem with quality. Regular Teams meetings are fine for up to 300 attendees, so you aren't going to be effected by any issues from the service. The network bandwidth used isn't really very different.

Things are different, for example you can't control who is one the screen like you can in a Live Event, and you'll have to ask your audience to stay muted. 

BTW a tip I've used a few times is to get a cheap USB HDMI capture device, I then run a regular Teams meeting on one laptop with the sound and pictures being sent as if was plugged into a screen, but capture it on another PC that treats it as a webcam, then I can send that to the Live Event, allowing Teams to do the 3x3 video etc.

[#5]

Thanks :)

[#6]

Could you explain this a bit more, you have both a Meeting and a Live event set up? The presenters join the meeting and the audience joins the Live event?

[#7]

@Rob O'Keefe Yes. In the Live Event there's only me as a producer, but instead of a camera and mic I select my HDMI capture card. On the other laptop I have a regular Teams meeting in full screen.

You can also achieve the same without the capture card using the open source NDI tools to broadcast the screen form one over a network then to be a virtual input on the other, but that's a little harder to explain.