Microsoft has announced it is replacing Teams Live Events with “town hall”, a new one-to-many virtual experience.
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Teams Live Events, which is now set for full retirement in September 2024, was built outside of the Teams meeting platform, which town hall will be integrated into to simplify the user experience.
Town hall will be generally available for commercial customers from October 5, 2023, offering new features from the launch date, including event roles, external presenter, digital video recorder, and integration with Viva Engage.
Amber Waisanen, Product Marketing for Microsoft Teams at Microsoft, introduced the news via the Microsoft Tech Community blog: “With town halls, customers can host various types of internal as well as external events including company-wide town halls, all hands, global team meetings, internal broadcasts, fireside chats, and more.
“Town halls in Microsoft Teams enable customers to extend their reach to scale their message and connect with audiences around the world; create professionally produced, studio-quality events that deliver a more dynamic experience; and structure and manage audience engagement to maximize participation and maintain focus on the event.”
Town Hall features
Town hall will include both new and expanded features, as well as advanced features that will be available for Teams Premium customers.
The town hall attendee capacity in Office and Microsoft 365 is up to 10,000 attendees, with a 20,000 attendee capacity in Teams Premium.
For simultaneous event hosting, Office and Microsoft 365 customers will be able to host 15 events simultaneously across a tenant, while Teams Premium customers can host as many as 50 events at the same time.
The event duration will be the same as the Teams meeting time limit, which is up to 30 hours for Office, Microsoft 365, and Teams Premium users.
Town hall will support third-party eCDN providers for Office and Microsoft 365 customers, and first-party, Microsoft eCDN in Teams Premium, providing organisers with real-time usage analytics via the Events Insights dashboard.
Organisers and presenters can come together in a virtual green room to prepare for events. The green room offers presenters a separate space from attendees where they can discuss stage content, conduct a briefing, and do a test run. This feature will be the same as the current green room experience in Teams Live Events. It will be available for all Teams meetings, webinars, and town halls for Office, Microsoft 365, and Teams Premium offerings.
Both organisers and presenters can manage attendee views so that they can only see the shared content and participants that are on-screen. This allows presenters to share information and practice their presentations in an off-screen area. Up to seven presenters can be shown with content on the screen at the same time, as a result, which Microsoft says has been one of their most requested features.
Only organisers and presenters will have access to the people roster and attendees who have joined, the participant list is hidden from attendees.
RTMP-in allows users to produce events from an external hardware or software encoder and connect external media feeds to the event. Organisers and presenters can livestream a custom RTMP source. This functionality is akin to the Teams Encoder in Teams Live Events.
Using RTMP-out, the event can be streamed from a custom app or endpoint outside of Teams. Events can then be viewed on third-party platforms like Youtube, LinkedIn, Meta Workplace, X, and more.
Organisers will be able to create a more structured Q&A with conversation moderation and a seamless system for asking questions and interacting with speakers. Questions can be managed and moderated as they come in, questions can be published or dismissed, and answers are threaded, making them easier to follow. Conversations can be pinned and anonymous posting can also be enabled for attendees. This functionality was also available in Teams Live Events and Teams webinars. Q&A for Office and Microsoft 365 users can support up to 10,000 attendees for Office and Microsoft 365 offerings, and up to 20,000 attendees for Teams Premium customers.
