Microsoft is making enhancements to deliver ultra-low latency to its Town Hall meetings.
“With ultra-low latency, attendees will now be able to view and participate in a town hall instance at a much lower latency than before, ensuring they are in sync with content being shared by presenters and organizers,”
Microsoft said in a blog post.
This update, available for town hall organizers with a Teams Premium license, aims to improve the attendee experience compared to the delay currently sometimes experienced.
Teams’ Town Hall
Microsoft Town Hall is a feature in Microsoft Teams designed for hosting large-scale virtual events and meetings.
It provides a one-to-many communication format with advanced production capabilities, allowing organizations to connect with up to 10,000 attendees, or 20,000 with Teams Premium.
Town Hall offers features such as presenter spotlight, translated captions, and attendee reports, making it ideal for company-wide reviews, all-hands meetings, and internal broadcasts.
Unlike regular Teams meetings, Town Hall focuses on the speakers and shared information, with attendee cameras and microphones turned off by default.
However, due to this huge capacity and these presentation abilities, the system can experience a 20-30 second delay between actions and what viewers see.
Microsoft says that this ultra-low latency update will allow attendees to view and participate in town hall instances at a much lower latency than before, “ensuring they are in sync with the content being shared by presenters and organizers.”
While “low latency” is often measured in milliseconds, “ultra-low latency” is measured in nanoseconds, resulting in a more seamless response time.
This update will reportedly allow up to 50,000 participants to engage in these events with minimal lag.
A Tide of Updates for Teams
Microsoft has been drip-feeding updates to its Teams platform throughout the past few months.
Like the Town Hall update, many are scheduled for release in May of this year.
Another release pegged for May is an update that will add a slide control feature for presentations on Teams calls that allows multiple people to control slides.
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