Effectively organize broadcasts using Microsoft Live Events

What are Live Events?

Microsoft Teams Live event are scalable and ideal solution for online meeting up to 10000 audience. Live events like All-Hand, Organization wide announcement, Webinar etc. Live Events scales online meetings to audiences with thousands of concurrent viewers. In background it leverages Artificial Intelligence for meeting assistance for features like captions & translation. Caption is very useful when attendee has issue in audio or need language translation. Optionally you can enable Q&A manager and Yammer social feed integration to interact with audience. You can record the event with video and after the live event Attendee engagement report available for consumption insights, like how many people joins and how long they stay with event.

Why live event works better? Live Events work better because it enables high quality and adaptive video streaming that can consume on any Teams enabled devices including Windows, macOS, mobile devices and devices which don’t Teams client installed through browser. Live Events are delivered with minimal lag from world-wide Microsoft datacenters, so no matter where your tenant is located, and user are located Live event always find shorted path to user to connect live event to avoid latency. Also, large organization can use third party enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) partner to save corporate bandwidth.

How do I use Live event effectively with minimum knowledge?

Live event can be schedule easily in teams, users can present and produce live event from macOS or Windows Teams client with one or more presenter including application sharing. You can present from Teams room system or presenter can join as dial-in from phone to live event using Teams audio conferencing. You as a live event organizer can control access to public, everyone from organization or specific group/ people options.

• Schedule and manage easily in Teams
• Produce and present from Mac or Windows Team client
• Present with one or multiple presenters, screen & window sharing
• Present from a Teams room system
• Presenters can also dial-in via Audio Conferencing
• Control access – public, all-company, or specific groups/people options

Organizing Live Event is very simple;

Start with scheduling event – Schedule live event in Teams is super easy, in order to schedule Live event, you can click meeting and then choose Live event then set permission like public, org-wide and or people and group. Refer below image.

then set the production type by selecting Quick start or third-party production then click on “schedule” to get event schedule. Example, For this post, I have used “Teams” meeting as production type refer the below image.

This is producer view, here on top you can see two windows, Queue and Live event. Left one queue is one present next, you can always queue next contents, like after video, present slide that you queue. Once ready for present then click on send live button to everyone can see it.

Whatever under Live event is seen by attendees. At the bottom you see different presenter that where you can choose different video, people, yourself and content that where you can choose content from.

Above image shows Q&A manager, if you decide to schedule meeting with Q&A manager to allow user to ask question, you can open or hide Q&A manager or keep open all the time.

You can send broadcast messages or share link during the session.

What is Attendee experience using Live event?

Below image shows attendee experience when joining through Teams client. Video show big windows to follow the event and on the right side you can see Q&A because this event has Q&A manager enabled where attendee can ask questions.

Below image shows attendee experience on desktop:

Below mentioned screen shows captions, whatever speaker speaks can get translated using AI and users can read the translation. You can also change language that you want to read. AI actually translate language in background.

 Finally, once live event ended, you can download some resources, including recording, Q&A report, Attendee engagement report and Transcripts. Refer below image.

Tips & tricks for organizing Live Events:

Here are the useful tips and tricks for organizing Live events, again organizing live event is easy however make sure that you are following all best practices because what presenter sending is viewed by attendees.

Testing meeting:

• Run multiple test and rehearsal live event that will give some experience to producer, presenter for PowerPoint sharing on how this work While testing live event Include Q&A and screen sharing.

• Remember; Each Live Event can only be started once. While stopping live event think twice because you cannot stop live event.
• You must connect presenter and producer computer to reliable network (wired is preferred however reliable wireless fine too). Test your network by connecting test live event and see if everything works.

Tips for event team:

• You must have more than one person in the event team, so if one presenter faces any issues in presenting in live event then others presenter can present, and live event will be successful.
• Ask presenter to join with one person joining from a different location. That way If one presenter lose internet, the remote person can still control the meeting and covered for network specific issues.
• Make sure event team member responsible for each step such as producing, presenting, moderating Q&A.
• Consider using a redirection URL service in attendee invites, that allows you to share shorter, more readable URLs the URL of the meeting without having to update the invites. E.g. bit.ly
• Make sure to start the Teams meeting 30 minutes ahead of time for final equipment check that way you can eliminate last minute issues.
• You must have a slide ready with a nice intro (“Event will start soon”) and start broadcast 10 minutes ahead of time and have Audio source muted during that 10 minutes.
• Live meeting broadcast delayed by several seconds as expected.
• Audio is the most important part of a Live Event hence use certified audio equipment or company provided audio headset. Avoid any handheld microphones.
• It is important to use enough lighting to shows video properly.
• You can leverage HDMI as input for your meeting with an HDMI capture device and you can also use these devices to capture PC or Mac output.

Remember; to effectively organize Live event you must follow best practices and planning, so that you will be mitigating last minutes issues.

Thank you.