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Overview
With Teams lives events, users in your organization can broadcast video and meeting content to large online audiences.
Microsoft 365 live events bring live video streaming to a new level. Live events encourage connection throughout the entire engagement lifecycle with attendees before, during, and after live events. You can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides, using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer.
Teams delivers chat-based collaboration, calling, meetings, and live events, so you can expand the audience of your meetings. Teams live events is an extension of Teams meetings, enabling users to broadcast video and meeting content to a large online audience. Live events are meant for one-to-many communications where the host of the event is leading the interactions and audience participation is primarily to view the content shared by host. The attendees can watch the live or recorded event in Yammer, Teams, or Stream and can interact with the presenters using moderated Q & A or a Yammer conversation.
Teams live events are considered the next version of Skype Meeting Broadcast and will eventually replace the capabilities provided in Skype Meeting Broadcast. At this point, Microsoft will continue to support Skype Meeting Broadcast for users who are using Skype for Business in their organizations, with no disruption in service for new or future events. However, we encourage you to try out Teams live events to use all the new and exciting features including screen sharing and support for external hardware/software encoders.
So, let's get started. First, take a look at the following diagram that shows high level components involved in Microsoft 365 live events and how they're connected.
Note
We would like to emphasize that Teams Live Events, given the nature of broadcast technology, often exceed normal (internal) meeting populations.
As is the case with other larger reaching media broadcasting services, we rely on Content Delivery Networks to deliver the content for your live event to recipients. This content is protected by encryption methods and subject to authorization by access tokens that are only issued to recipients based on your live event meeting configuration.
Extra care should be given to ensuring that either the meeting content is appropriate for such a large audience, or that the audience is appropriately reduced for sensitive content.
As is common in the industry, compromises to other elements of your security such as personnel or infrastructure, could impact the security of your live events. Organizations should consider including Live Events and other broadcast service in their security planning and exercises.
Event group roles
Live events in Teams empower multiple roles (organizer, producer, presenter, and attendee) to successfully broadcast and participate in an event. To learn more, see Event group roles.
Key components
You can see from the picture above that there are five key components that are used with live events in Teams.
Note
For an overview of how to set up live events and the attendee experience, check out these short videos.
Scheduling
Teams provides the ability for the organizers to create an event with the appropriate attendee permissions, designate event team members, select a production method, and invite attendees. If the live event was created from within a Yammer group, the live event attendees will be able to use Yammer conversation for interacting with people in the event.
Important
Teams won't let users schedule meetings or live events when they're offline or running with limited bandwidth.
Production
The video input is the foundation of the live event and it can vary from a single webcam to a multi-camera professional video production. The live events in Microsoft 365 support a spectrum of production scenarios, include an event produced in Teams using a webcam or an event produced in an external app or device. You can choose these options depending on their project requirements and budget. There are two ways to produce events:
Teams: This production method allows users to produce their live events in Teams using their webcam or using A/V input from Teams room systems. This option is the best and quickest option if you want to use the audio and video devices connected to the PC or are inviting remote presenters to participate in the event. This option allows users to easily use their webcams and share their screen as input in the event.
External app or device: External encoders allow users to produce their live events directly from an external hardware or software-based encoder with Stream. This option is best if you already have studio quality equipment (for example, media mixers) which support streaming to a Real-time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) service. This type of production is typically used in large-scale events such as executive town halls – where a single stream from a media mixer is broadcasted to the audience.
Note
The change from using Microsoft Stream to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint for meeting recordings will be a phased approach. At launch you'll be able to opt-in to this experience, in November you'll have to opt-out if you want to continue using Stream, and some time in early 2021 we'll require all customers to use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint for new meeting recordings.
Streaming platform
The live event streaming platform is made up of the following pieces:
- Azure Media Services: Azure Media Services gives you broadcast-quality video streaming services to reach larger audiences on today’s most popular mobile devices. Media Services enhances accessibility, distribution, and scalability, and makes it easy and cost-effective to stream content to your local or worldwide audiences — all while protecting your content.
- Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN): Once your stream goes live, it's delivered through the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN). Azure Media Services provides integrated CDN for streaming endpoints. This allows the streams to be viewed worldwide with no buffering.
Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN)
The goal of eCDN is to take the video content from the internet and distribute the content throughout your enterprise without impacting network performance. You can use one of the following certified eCDN partners to optimize your network for live events held within your organization:
Attendee experience
The attendee experience is the most important aspect of live events and it's critical that the attendees can participate in the live event without having any issues. The attendee experience uses Stream Player (for events produced in Teams) and Azure Media Player (for events produced in an external app or device) and works across desktop, browser, and mobile (iOS, Android). Microsoft 365 and Office 365 provide Yammer and Teams as two collaboration hubs, and the live attendee experience is integrated into these collaboration tools.
Live event usage report
Tenant admins can view real-time usage analytics for live events in Microsoft Teams admin center. The live event usage report shows the activity overview of the live events held in the organization. Admins can view event usage information, including event status, start time, views, and production type.
Next steps
Go to Plan for Teams live events.
Related topics
Webex Meetings Updates
June brings some good news, which is something we can all use! This month’s edition will provide you with updates on Webex Assistant, blurred backgrounds, and VDI support as well as insights to improved user experience with Webex Meetings on desktop and mobile. We are continuously working to keep Webex Meetings a user friendly and intuitive platform which is why I am excited to share these updates with you.
Webex Assistant Trials Have Started + Webex Assistant Edits on iOS and Android
You can now use just your voice with Webex Assistant to handle some of the mundane meeting tasks and enhance your Webex Meetings experience. Now, in trial, Webex Meetings gives you live transcription, automated closed captioning and highlights, voice commands, recorded transcripts and post-meeting support such as keyword search across your recording meetings. The 90-day free trial is available and to all Cisco customers*. Contact your collaboration sales specialist or account manager for more information on how to sign up.
Webex Assistant is officially supported on this month’s update and will be orderable toward the end of the month. Webex Assistant is also coming to the Webex Meetings mobile app. For iOS and Android users, after a meeting, mobile hosts and content owners will be able to:
-Edit transcript
-Edit/remove the highlights/title of the record
-Share highlights/transcript to others
For the Desktop
MAC background blur – You can already do this today on iOS devices, but we’re now bringing it to Mac users. And just in time, because this feature will be very useful while working from home or from an open workspace. You can now blur the background of your webcam video when joining Webex Meetings and Webex Events from a Mac. The blur capability can help clean up a messy or unprofessional background and quickly get you ready for your video call. It offers privacy and removes items from your background that may detract from your meeting (like your kid’s soccer game 😊). So, go ahead and join a video meeting from anywhere without worrying about what others might see behind you. And very soon, you’ll be able to choose a different background altogether. Stay tuned for that!
Choose Scheduler for Webex Meetings Desktop App – Webex site meeting scheduler has been added as a customization option to the Schedule button in the desktop app. This is a great benefit for those who do not use Outlook as their scheduling tool. IT administrators can choose the setting and deploy it to all users on their site.
Grid View Webex Teams App
VDI supporting VMWare and Citrix with Ubuntu and eLux – I am excited to announce the availability of the early field trials (EFT) of Cisco Meetings VDI now being supported on VMWare with Windows thin clients and Citrix with Ubuntu and eLux thin clients. Now end users can experience optimized audio and high definition video on their VDI desktops in the same way as laptop devices with minimal latency and high fidelity. Administrators can download the VDI plug-in for these thin-client platforms from their Webex site to easily deploy to their end-users.
Improved Call Me option – Put this in the no brainer category. Whether connecting to your meeting audio from your computer or from your mobile/desk phone, we want the experience to be as simple as possible. With the June update, you now can very easily add or edit a phone number more intuitively when dialing in from mobile using the Call me feature. It is now more clear where a user needs to add (or edit) their phone number.
Mobile Updates
Increased grid view: iOS and Android
Want to see everybody in the meeting when you’re on mobile? With this month’s update, we’ve added the number of videos and made a video grid view the default layout for meetings! This enhances the quality of mobile meetings by allowing you to see more of your meeting participants at the same time, including your own self-view in the grid.
Android:
- phone user’s default meeting setting will be a 3×2 grid view for landscape mode
- tablet user’s default setting will be a 3×3 grid view in landscape mode
- Tablet user’s default setting will be a 4×2 grid view in portrait mode
iPhone:
- (Beta) a 3×2 grid view for landscape mode
- 2×2 grid view will be the default setting for portrait mode
- An additional 3×3 grid view is available for iPhone landscape mode that can be turned on in-app settings.
Both Android and iOS users can revert to their original grid view via their in-app settings.
Smart Meeting Bandwidth detection – Your mobile meetings will no longer be interrupted when you experience poor network connections. Mobile users will be prompted to turn off video when they are experiencing low bandwidth so that the audio quality remains strong. This feature is available for iOS and Android.
How To Grid View In Webex
Mute/Unmute from the lock screen – When you are walking to your car while in a meeting, you will be able to mute and unmute your audio from your lock screen. No more awkward pauses while fumbling with things in your hand, trying to type in your passcode to answer a question in a meeting.
One Tap to Join for Android users – Android users now only have to touch one button to join a meeting. No more being late to your meetings because you are searching emails for access codes and passwords.
For more information on these features, please visit the Webex Help Portal – What’s New for the Latest Versions of Webex Meetings 40.6
* not yet available to Webex Online customers
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