Known as Broadcast Meetings in its original form and part of Microsoft’s 2018 upgrade roadmap, this feature is now available as Live Events.
With Microsoft Teams Live Events, users can broadcast video and meeting content to a wide audience base. The goal here is to improve the quality of live video streaming, pushing connection and collaboration, both before, during, and after live events. The Live Event can be used regardless of location through Microsoft STream, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer.
The Live Events feature intends to expand Microsoft Teams’ ever-growing roster of capabilities and is geared for one-to-many communications, where a host is leading interaction and audience participation is primarily driven by content viewing (as shared by the host).
Let’s zero in on key components:
Scheduling
You can now create an event with attendee permissions, designating event team members, selecting production methods, and inviting attendees. If the live event is created from within a Yammer group, attendees will be able to use Yammer conversations for people-to-people interactions.
Production
The feature supports a variety of production scenarios such as a quick-start event via webcams or an external encoder, using studio-grade equipment. The video input is at the foundation of Live Events, and one can choose from two ways to produce events:
- Quick-start production - This method lets users produce live events by utilising Teams Meetings. The option is fast and easy to deploy, based primarily on webcams, and is meant for meetings where audio and video devices are connected to a PC. Here, remote presenters are usually invited to participate in the event
- External encoder production - This is based on using external hardware or software-based encoder with Microsoft Stream. If you’re organising a large-scale event (like a town-hall) and can access studio-grade equipment, this is your best bet
Here, a single stream from a media mixer is broadcast to the audience.
Streaming platform
The Live Events’ streaming platform has the following parts:
- Azure Media Services - It allows you to broadcast quality video streaming, available on today’s most popular mobile devices. It enhanced distribution, scalability, and accessibility; what’s more, it’s also cost-effective even as it protects your content
- Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Once the stream is live, it is delivered via the CDN. Azure Media Services ensures that integrated CDN is available for streaming endpoints, ensuring it can be viewed across the world with zero buffering lags
[caption id="attachment_20120" align="aligncenter" width="800"]
Scheduling a Live Event - click to enlarge[/caption]
A final word
Video is where it’s at and Microsoft Teams, in its new replenished and multi-faceted avatar is ready to offer best-in-class, quality focused video streaming capabilities that will ensure the application/platforms continued usage across small-to-large presentation scenarios. This is a good move by Microsoft and bodes well for Teams’ popularity numbers for 2019.
