Teams Meetings and Multicast

[TheCompWizWork]

Does anyone know if Microsoft Teams supports multicast for meetings (or live events? or ???) I'm on a bit of a feasibility study right now for a larger project coming up.

In short, I have a group of people in a remote location with limited bandwidth, trying to view content from a single presenter in a different country.  If a dozen users are attempting to view a stream from that presenter, would that consume 12x the bandwidth to simply attend the meeting? or does Teams support multicast or some sort of peer-sharing protocol to eliminate/reduce the overall bandwidth?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @TheCompWizWork 

Teams is unicast but gets around this with Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) providers such as Ramp and Hive. See here

Set up for live events in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

Step 4: Set up a video distribution solution for live events in Teams

Playback of live event videos uses adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) but it's a unicast stream, meaning every viewer is getting their own video stream from the internet. For live events or videos sent out to large portions of your organization, there could be a significant amount of internet bandwidth consumed by viewers. For organizations that want to reduce this internet traffic for live events, live events solutions are integrated with Microsoft's trusted video delivery partners offering software defined networks (SDNs) or enterprise content delivery networks (eCDNs). These SDN/eCDN platforms enable organizations to optimize network bandwidth without sacrificing end user viewing experiences. Our partners can help enable a more scalable and efficient video distribution across your enterprise network.

Hope this answers your question

Best, Chris